


East Side Is a Paradise of You

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2022, Abuse, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chaptered, Depression, Drugs, Existential Crisis, Fluff, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Near Death, Suicide Attempt, Trust Issues, deaf!dan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2018-07-22 08:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 52,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7428274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan and Phil didn’t fight or have a dramatic breakup. No, they didn’t even date, even if they came dangerously close to doing so many times. They just...drifted. It’s now 2020, and for the first time in the three years after Dan moved out, Dan is back to square one with his depression and existential crisis, partly due to his current unhealthy relationship. And then it hits him: guilt about everything that happened - and didn’t happen - between him and Phil. Too scared to contact Phil but too obsessed now to turn back, Dan attends the annual VidCon in the hopes of catching his ex-best friend there. But will Phil still be willing to trust him? And is Dan even the same person anymore?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title derived from the lyrics of "High" by Zella Day.

Everybody thought Phil Lester would be the first to grow up. Not because he acted like an adult, really - he still made animal noises like a child and hugged his stuffed lions and jokingly pulled puppy dog faces to get what he wanted - but because he was 30 years old. Thirty. Three decades he’d spent on earth, and half of those years he had already dedicated to YouTube. And between him and his flatmate-slash-fellow-YouTuber Dan Howell, Phil had always seemed to be the more balanced one, never procrastinating, always finding time to go outside in the sun (dragging Dan along with him), and finishing not just a college education but even a graduate degree. And Phil was, after all, the one who always said it: he wanted to be in media and hopefully be a director someday. So naturally everyone thought the fateful day would come when he would make it big with the movies and have to stop his channel due to time constraints. When he would finally move on.

But as it turned out, Dan was the one who became the first to grow up. And perhaps, arguably, the first to grow apart.

“Dan, when d’you suppose you’re going to start editing that video?” Phil said increasingly often, as the summer of 2016 lagged to a close.

“I dunno. Tonight, maybe.”

“Such a procrastinator…” Phil would singsong. Dan would usually break down in giggles and struggle to find Phil’s face with one hand while keeping the other on the game controls.

Later on, though, Dan would just chuckle or roll his eyes, and Phil would then cast a wide-eyed glance in Dan’s direction, his mouth twisted to the side in what was always meant to be an encouraging smile but often came out as an adorable frown. He worried often about Dan - it was just his way with people, especially his best friend - but Dan hadn’t been showing any particularly alarming signs of existential crises or withdrawal from social interaction. They had still been going out regularly with PJ and Chris, and Dan still replied faithfully to fans’ tweets every day or so. Phil had to admit, however, that Dan seemed to be relying more and more on the live shows for fan interaction - or slipping in and out of Phil’s own videos - rather than making official videos for his danisnotonfire channel.

Phil knew Dan loved his fans, and he was fairly certain he would have noticed immediately if anything had changed in Dan’s daily mood, so he said nothing other than to throw about the occasional “procrastinator” joke. He said nothing for so long, until the day came when he woke up as he usually did and he shuffled, still half-blind, to the kitchen with his hands out groping for the cereal box on the counter, and sat down to eat alone without realizing his solitude for many minutes.

It had been weeks - no, months - since the last time he and Dan had eaten breakfast together. Granted, Phil was the early riser, but back in 2015 they had fallen into the habit of waiting for each other to wake up so they could share breakfast over an anime.

Phil’s mouth was slightly open as he sat swimming in his thoughts. At least we still watch some movies together at night, he reasoned; but then there bubbled up the remembrance that the last time they had done that had likewise been a month ago. He couldn’t even remember too clearly the last time they had gone shopping together, whether for food or for clothes or just for fun.

Within a few seconds Phil found himself outside Dan’s door, knocking. “Dan? Are you up yet?”

An inconclusive grunt issued from the other side. 

“I’m guessing no. Can I come in?”

Another grunt.

Phil pushed open the door, only to be greeted by a checked pillow being lobbed at his face. “Ow! What was that for?”

“I told you I wasn’t up yet!”

“I’m sorry…?” Again the half-smile, half-frown returned to Phil’s face. Dan was struggling to sit up, pinching the bridge of his nose, and if Phil hadn’t known better, he would have thought Dan actually looked cross. Very much so.

“Sorry. Didn’t get much sleep last night,” mumbled Dan.

The admission sent a shaky, silent sigh of relief through Phil, and he attempted a chuckle. “Okay. I’ll get you back for that someday, you know. You scare me way too many times in my own flat.”

“It’s for the fans, Phil.”

Phil knew Dan was joking - and possibly the whole pillow-catapulting incident was a joke as well - but the unusually deadpan tone still made his stomach twist with unease.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Dan spoke again. “Close the door on the way out, will you?”

~

Dan was missing his family. To be fair, he brought Phil along on their Christmas holiday, but Phil had obligations to attend to once the third week of January rolled around, and so reluctantly Phil had taken his leave and returned to London. Dan promised him he’d be back in just another week.

One week turned into two. And then inevitably Dan found himself back at the London flat. He missed Phil, he told himself. He had come back to find that old and comforting place again - it didn’t matter where, as long as Phil was there. But Phil was not in the lounge or the kitchen when he keyed himself in, and as he trudged across the carpet without even taking off his shoes this time, he was suddenly and maddeningly affronted by the realization that he wanted to check on his room first before even looking around for Phil. A second later, he heard a chair creak upstairs, and Dan figured his flatmate was in the editing room with his headphones in and thus hadn’t heard him enter the apartment.

An hour later saw Dan mindlessly folding things into a suitcase behind the closed door of his room. He didn’t even fold things. When he needed to go somewhere, he just threw all his clothes into the bag last-minute and dashed out the door. Maybe he just needed something to do while he was thinking. Or maybe he wasn’t even thinking at all, just floating around in his own mind-palace - no, that was Phil’s word for it. His train of thoughts swiftly changed course.

“Dan! When did you get back?”

Dan’s eyes snapped upward. “Hey. A few minutes ago, I suppose.” He hastened to grab the clothes from out of the suitcase and throw them back onto the bed, as if he were unpacking.

Phil seemed unsure whether to approach any further from the doorway and instead stuffed his hands - or rather, a few fingers - in his pockets. “You didn’t text or call? I would have come to the station straightaway to help you get your stuff up.”

Dan waved his hand airily. “It’s okay.”

“You sure? Well, I guess there’s no use asking that now.” An off-beat chuckle. “Hope you had a good time with the family…?”

“Yeah, it was fine. A little hectic. They left for New York last Friday. What about you?”

There was a dead silence. Then: “So you were alone in the house for several days?”

“Christ, Phil, maybe I was. Someone needed to take down the tinsel. No need to baby me.” Dan tacked on what he hoped was a jesting grin to soften the sharp tone, but inwardly he was cursing himself for the slip. A disturbing thought prodded him then, and he couldn’t shake it, try as he might. Since when did he and Phil resort to excuses and barbs and masked faces?

And then another, more perturbing notion presented itself to him. He hadn’t actually looked forward to the holiday with the family. Jeez, he had been relieved when they were all packed up and gone. And now that Phil, his safe place and his comfort, was standing here right in front of him, something still felt inexplicably empty. So what was he really missing?

Dan was normally quite articulate about his emotions, verbally or otherwise. It alarmed him now that he couldn’t even begin to sort out his own feelings this time.

And so he drifted about, sometimes talking to Phil several hours a day and sometimes not at all, and sometimes he went out alone for a coffee or a movie. He found himself staying out later and later at night, throwing away the cinema ticket stubs on his way home, even waiting outside the very door of the flat until he heard Phil go up the stairs and he could come in quietly himself. Sometimes he stayed overnight at friends’ places - he wasn’t sure sometimes if it was on purpose or by accident. Nothing seemed purposeful about him anymore.

He tried one last video, but he knew it wasn’t very good. His fans went wild as soon as he posted it. Dan smiled at first, but his head began to ache and he shut off the Twitter app and crawled into bed instead to lie half-awake for many more hours. 

After the video, Phil seemed perky and smiling more often, but he didn’t ask Dan directly about it. Didn’t congratulate him, either, or let him know verbally that he had seen it. The fact lay unspoken between them. Everything these days was left unspoken.

It was November of 2017, and the bitterest beginnings of a snowstorm had bid an early hello. Dan had a suitcase in his hand and he frankly didn’t remember how he had gotten to the station. So many of his treasured possessions hadn’t fit in the suitcase and were still left behind at the flat, but tonight was a night when Dan didn’t care.

Fleetingly, as he dragged his tall frame between the doors of the train, he remembered something that almost made him feel alive: that kiss in the snow back in 2009, when Phil was laughing loudly and making snow angels and grabbed Dan’s ankle to make him topple to the ground too, but Dan had instead landed on top of him and in the heat of the moment, caving in to the romanticism of the snowflakes swirling around him, Dan had dipped his head down and pressed his lips to Phil’s.

Dan jerked away reflexively from the memory. There was nothing to remember there. Nothing to talk about, either, because he and Phil had never talked about the kiss - not that day, not on any day thereafter. The flirtatious banter may have continued, but nothing more. Both of them were too afraid - or too unsure - or too busy. Or perhaps he had always been too much of a coward.

~

Phil found the note on the fridge the next morning. Without his glasses, he had to squint to read it.

_Been feeling like I need a personal holiday for a long while. Don’t worry about me, I’ll just be taking time off to think about my options. Phone might be dead soon since I’m traveling. Should be back soon. -Dan_

“Options?” Phil mumbled to himself. “What the hell…”

So of course the first thing he did was to text Dan. When he pulled up the conversation in his phone, he gave a little start. Their last exchange had been February of 2017.

Dan kept up the replies for a decent length of time, but after two weeks of intermittent and noncommittal messages, his texts became more and more terse. Phil, for his part, though still worried, had a lot on his plate that could not be set aside.

By January of 2018, virtually all contact had broken off between them. The door to Dan’s room was shut and all the dusty nerd knickknacks inside it lay untouched.

~

The bright LED light on Dan’s phone flashed insistently from the top of his side table. It was an incoming call, not a text. He glanced at the time on his laptop: 4:47 a.m. Shit, he had stayed up late again. He was inclined to ignore the call at first, thinking it was one of his old friends still in England, but when he saw it was Blake, he frowned. Blake never stayed up this late or woke up this early.

“Sorry to wake you up,” Blake said right away.

“No, you didn’t. Sorry I didn’t pick up right away, couldn’t find my bloody hearing aids.”

“Oh. That’s fine.”

Dan eased into a more comfortable cross-legged position on his bed and focused his gaze on the pulsing night light. “So what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I...”

“You know you can tell me anything. You don’t just call at this hour.”

“It’s nothing. I - well, I guess I was just missing your voice.”

All the worry that Dan had unconsciously been balling up inside over the past minute immediately melted into a cheesy smile. “I miss your voice, too, you weasel.”

“I hate you.” Blake’s static chuckle through the speaker still came across like heaven.

“I hate you more,” said Dan. After a small silence: “But for real. Need to talk about anything?”

“Not anything I can put into words right now.”

“Okay. I love you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, ‘cause you only say it, like, three hundred fucking times a day, dork.”

“I do not!”

Blake screeched with laughter on the other end. “Damn. I wish you were lying next to me right now.”

“Same. The whole entire LA sucks without you.”

“Don’t say that, your boss might hear you.”

“When are you coming back from the shoot?”

“I told you, next Tuesday, silly,” said Blake. “Only four days away.”

With a groan, Dan let himself collapse backwards on the duvet. “That’s ninety-six hours from now.”

“More like ninety. You can do this, Dan,” Blake singsonged. “Dan. Dan. Dan. Stop groaning. You’re not dying.”

“But I am…”

“Shut up, dork. I’ve got to get some sleep now, and so do you. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

When the line clicked and went dead, Dan slowly lowered the phone and let it roll away across the sheets. The last thing he remembered was staring at the pretty shadows that the blinking night light cast on his dark ceiling, and thinking how warm and tingly and indescribable Blake made him feel inside, and how he didn’t care about the migraine the hearing aids would give him in the morning from sleeping with them in. If Blake called again, he wanted to be able to hear the ring - just in case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Wha-hoo! And there’s my first chapter of my very first phanfic ever. Just to be clear, the last scene is set in 2020. And no, Dan is not born deaf in this particular fic; everything pre-2016 is the same as real-life Dan and Phil. Also, just as a side note, I am American so I won’t be using British spelling - just common British lingo in the dialogue where applicable. But back to the point! ...What could have possibly happened in Dan’s life since he left? And what does Phil think of all this? Will they ever meet again? Read on for more! ~M


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Here’s another chapter in the same posting. I thought it made a lot more sense to put up the first two chapters together so as to give you guys a better sense of the context of the story. Thanks for reading. :)

Just like everyone thought Phil would be the first one to grow up, many thought that Phil was the one who needed Dan less. Sometimes he watched their old videos collabing with PJ or Chris and scrolled down to the comments, where fans would type: _4:41 aww, there goes Dan’s jealous smile thingy again. I can relate sooo much, when my best friend is talking to someone else i’m all like “get away! They’re MY friend!”_

It got into his head sometimes, reading so many comments and fan theories. Though he didn’t do it often, on the nights that he did, he would sit in front of his monitor in a daze and with a slightly panicked expression, as if he were drowning inside because he could hardly tell anymore who he was or who Dan had been anymore. Dan once said that Phil had saved him, emotionally and physically. Phil could have said the same thing, though to what extent he was no longer sure. But certainly, if one became best friends with his savior, wouldn’t they be able to stay lifelong companions? He’d read somewhere before that if you had been friends with someone for seven years, psychologists predicted the relationship would last the rest of your lives.

Dan was no longer answering his texts. It had gotten to the point where reviving the conversation would just be awkward and painful, Phil thought. Eventually, he got used to the profound silence from the bedroom next door, the lack of creaking floorboards or the expletives following a thump onto the carpet. He even got used to hearing the ding of the notifications on his phone without expecting it to be Dan.

“We haven’t talked in a while,” said Phil one night as he shared a post-collab wine with Louise.

“And by ‘a while,’ I assume you mean last week?” Louise retorted, hiding her small grin behind the bottle.

Phil felt too drowsy to catch the joke. Eyes closed, leaning back on the palms of his hands as he crossed his legs in front of him, Phil shook his head. “Like...last year...or was it this year? Hard to remember...around New Year’s, I think.”

“Shit. Wow. Is he okay?”

A sleepy shrug. “I guess. Probably just busy.”

“Busy doing _what_?”

Phil cracked open an eye to appraise the pink-haired woman’s expression. “Haven’t you talked to him lately?”

“Only half as often as you two do,” Louise snorted. “Didn’t he say he’d be back?”

Phil gave her another noncommittal shrug.

Louise heaved a deep sigh and uncrossed her legs, leaning forward with one arm on her knee. “Phil...I know what you’re feeling. Friends do that sometimes. It isn’t anyone’s fault.”

“Do what?”

“Grow...up. Apart. For goodness’ sake, it happens between spouses.”

“But we weren’t…” Phil stopped himself, then lay down in the carpet with his arms sprawled above his head. “I guess I didn’t talk to him as much as I used to, either, in the months before he left,” he finally admitted.

Louise cast him a sympathetic look. “You haven’t asked him about it since he moved out, have you? Not even once?”

 _Moved out_. The odd word choice made him pause. Then, sheepishly, Phil shook his head. “His stuff’s still in the room. I thought he was bound to come back for some of it.”

Louise looked and sounded as if she were about to say something, but apparently she thought better of it and instead directed their attention to the last bottles of wine. “Shall we toast?”

“To what? Idiots? Or friends branching out?”

“Whatever suits your fancy, Phil.”

~

Maybe it was that late-night, half-drunk conversation that made up Phil’s mind. In that odd, uniquely Phil-Lester-way in which only his brain could work, he decided to dig through one of his older hard drives and flip through outtake footage of their gaming videos. He stumbled across one that he’d almost forgotten about, but as soon as he started playing it, the nostalgia didn’t creep up on him as it should have; it simply struck him in the face like a cold wave. It was a video they had completely rejected because of their stupid comments and uncontrollable laughter as they struggled to make it all the way to the end of the Impossible Quiz.

“Christ, Phil, we went over this. We cannot afford to misclick again!” Dan sputtered in the video. “That’s it, I’m officially taking over the mouse.”

Phil from almost four years ago in the video was pouting with wide eyes. “Why, don’t you like a little bit of suspense?”

Dan’s left hand was waving around to find Phil’s neck while his right hand covered his own reddening face, half off-camera. “It’s not _suspense_ anymore if we’re dying over and over again and have to keep going back through the first eighty-seven questions to get back to where we were, Phil. This is almost as horrific as Slenderman.”

Phil in the present day stretched and rubbed his eyes. He remembered that day so clearly now; he and Dan had ventured out into the London drizzle for some bubble tea before coming back home to film the game, hence the curling ends of Dan’s fringe which had also been a paramount reason for their rejecting the video after the fact. Phil didn’t mind the hair, really - in fact he had difficulty restraining himself from petting Dan’s curls when he wasn’t looking - but they’d agreed to chuck the video anyway for being somewhat unoriginal and blasé.

After three hours of editing, Phil hit “Public” on the upload. He didn’t think his heart had ever beat faster before, if the notion was even possible. But waiting for the comments to reel in just after publishing to YouTube was a bit of a stretch for his health at the moment, so he shut off the monitor as soon as he saw the processing bar read “Complete.” Tea, he thought. He definitely needed some tea.

He hadn’t even finished watching the kettle boil when his phone began to spasm in his pocket. The comments and tweets were skyrocketing insanely.

_@AmazingPhil Great new video!! I’ve been dying for a new update from this channel for forever!_  
_@AmazingPhil wtaf dan is alive?!?!?!??? when did u wake him up from his existential crisis ?_  
_@danisnotonfire SNEAKY DAN POPPING UP IN PHIL’S VIDEOS LIKE THAT_  
_Yayyy! I always wanted you guys to finish the impossible quiz @AmazingPhil @danisnotonfire_  
_@danisnotonfire i see what u did there. So when u gonna post a new vid to ur channel plz_

“Oh my God,” said Phil aloud. “I’m such a genius.”

His fingers were shaking. Quickly he set the phone down on the edge of the counter before he could drop it and crack the screen again. “It’ll die down, won’t it?” he muttered to himself. “Eventually. It’s got to. Although I could always log into Dan’s Twitter and...ugh. I can’t. Why do I always do this to myself!”

The kettle was whining behind him, but Phil was too distraught, yanking at his fringe as he thought desperately what to do.

“That’s it,” he exclaimed finally, with a rare scowl. “He’s got to know. It’ll be a joke, I guess. But it’s a better chance than any to see what’s up with him.” With that, he seized his phone again and dialed Dan from his contacts.

_“I’m sorry, the number you have entered is invalid. The customer you are dialing has been permanently disconnected.”_

Phil still had the phone pressed up against his ear as the monotone voice droned on - almost as if he needed to hear it a second time, a third, to confirm what the sinking pit in his stomach was already telling him. And then, with the silence still humming from the other end of the line, he remembered the kettle and whirled to save it from flooding the entire stovetop. “ _Fuck_.”

~

Dan huffed, more out of show than from actual physical discomfort, as he hauled his lanky frame into the lecture center, fifteen minutes behind his time.

“...And here comes the very straggler we’ve been discussing. Good morning, James!” The professor shot him her most saccharine smile and gestured grandly at the only seat left in the first row.

His teachers only knew him by his middle name, but it still gave Dan a jolt whenever they used it. He stuttered. “I - had to take care of - ”

“You can tell me later, James. See, guys, when you’re a straggler in the world of journalism, who gets the first scoop? Let me hear y’all say it.”

“Everyone else!” the entire class yelled back as enthusiastically as they could at half past nine in the morning.

Dan knew he’d always been a terrible note taker, but he still went through the motions anyway. He hated these theory classes - the sooner he got his feet wet, he knew, the sooner he would feel at home in his newly chosen field. He remembered expressing his frustration to his adviser several weeks ago.

“So you think that you, a sophomore with zero experience, are ready to skip the rest of your theory track and start your internship right now? That’s what you’re telling me?” Dr. Millar had deadpanned at him.

“I do have experience. I mean, if they were to throw me into the broadcasting, standing in front of the camera is already something I’ve done so many times. And what I’m really here for anyway is the writing - you’ve seen my writing samples - ”

“You’ve worked with the camera? When?”

Dan had snapped his mouth shut at that precise moment with widened eyes as it washed over him that he’d slipped. Shit. “Um, you know what...never mind, Dr. Millar. Thanks for meeting with me. Have an awesome day!” And without even waiting to hear Dr. Millar’s thoughts or to zip up his own backpack, Dan had bolted out of the office, presumably never to return if he could help it.

“James!”

Dan quite literally jumped in his seat. Wincing, he readjusted his hearing aid, as if any of his fiddling would lessen the whining noise after his professor’s shouting.

“James,” the professor repeated sweetly. “So what has your group decided as a solution to our hypothetical problem?”

There had been group work? Panicked, Dan glanced around at his four classmates who had miraculously appeared around his work area in a circle. Shit. One of the girls at least looked sympathetic and seemed to be mouthing something behind her hand as she pretended to play with her frizzy curls with the other.

“Umm…” _Shit, Dan, you’re already known as the slacker anyway_. His eyes flicked to the dingy notes scrawled on the whiteboard. “Fly there as soon as possible?”

The room erupted in laughter. To her credit, the professor didn’t chuckle along with them, but she still seemed rather irked. “James, that’s the exact problem. Your group in this hypothetical situation doesn’t have the clearance yet to even approach the scene.”

Dan was completely lost. He glanced back at the frizzy-headed girl with pleading eyes. Thankfully, she cleared her throat and spoke up in his defense. “Well, professor, initially we were considering just sneaking onto the scene, y’know, just being practical. But then ultimately we decided to just interview witnesses first while waiting for clearance.”

 _Thank you so much_ , Dan mouthed at the girl. _It’s okay_ , she mouthed back.

Thirty minutes later, Dan struggled to pack up his things as swiftly and discreetly as possible, but just as he had made it halfway to the door his professor’s voice stopped him. “James, can we have a word?”

For a split second he considered the possibility of pretending to not have heard her - deaf perks, if ever there were any - but his feet had already stopped. With a silent groan, he turned back.

“Are you aware of your current grade for the semester?”

“A-minus, actually,” said Dan, trying to keep a straight face.

“For your written work and exams, yes. Your attendance and punctuality, however, could very easily pull that down.”

“I’m...sorry. I really like this class,” Dan lied through his teeth. “It just...gets hard to focus sometimes.” Behind his back, he physically crossed his fingers and hoped it sounded vague and euphemistic enough.

To his shock, the professor’s visage softened somewhat. So maybe she wasn’t as bad as his psycho French teacher from secondary school. “I know you do. Like this class, that is. It shows in your essays.” She drew a deep breath. “Our campus has a really well-developed counseling department. Have you ever considered visiting them?”

Dan gave a mute shake of his head.

“Well, here’s their number” - she reached into her tote for a business card - “so please, utilize the resources we offer. I hate to see a good student not being able to perform his best.” She nodded in farewell. “See you Wednesday.”

Dan stood there in the middle of the lecture hall for a long minute, turning the card over and over in his palm, before finally he crumpled it with his fist and pitched it away. The ball of paper bounced lightly off the opposite wall and then landed neatly in the bin. He chuckled humorlessly. “What the hell, that’s a first.”

And with that, he unhooked the hearing aids from his ears and shoved them into the pocket of his jeans, and he loped off out of the building after the last trickle of students dispersing.

~

Phil mopped his brow awkwardly with his fingers. Seattle was every bit as rainy as London, but in the unusual heat of May, everything was muggy and his jumper was clinging disgustingly to the skin at the small of his back.

“Why isn’t that extra with the rest of the group?” he yelled in the general direction of the cameramen hauling their equipment up the sloped street.

There was a buzz of confusion and turned heads, and then a skinny, plaid-shirted cameraman with a shock of blonde fringe dropped his own camera and began a flurry of hand gestures at the straggling bit player. Phil squinted to discern what was happening. After a few more seconds, the extra made a few hand signals in return, nodded in understanding, and ran after a smaller group of other bit players heading toward the north side of the set.

Phil made his way slowly to the blonde guy, who was re-adjusting his camera onto his shoulder. “Was he deaf, then?” Phil asked.

“Yeah,” said the blonde guy in a definitely American accent. “But he picked up the directions fast. No need to worry about him, sir.”

Phil groaned. “Will everyone stop calling me sir!”

“Director Lester, then,” the blonde grinned back cheekily. 

Phil relented with a sigh. “So, are you deaf? I mean - oh gosh, that sounds horribly rude. I was just wondering - you seemed really fluent in sign language - ”

“Nah, my ears are perfectly fine. Funny story though, I’ve always wanted to learn ASL and I took two classes in high school, but I never found them useful until I met my boyfriend. He’s deaf. That made me really pick it up fast.”

Phil cast him a genuine smile. “That’s really kind of you.”

“Yeah, well, he’s kind of a real keeper. Wouldn’t want something like a language barrier to stop my chances at finding love.”

“No, that _is_ sweet,” Phil reiterated. “So he taught you pretty much all you know?”

“Oh, no, we actually took classes together. He lost his hearing later in life. He has hearing aids, but they don’t pick up everything aside from ambient noise and loud voices. And he can’t wear them all the time, of course. For health reasons.”

“Of course,” murmured Phil, though he hadn’t the slightest clue what health reasons those might be and was simply too awkward to ask.

The blonde cameraman was grinning impishly again. “If you ever meet him, don’t tell him - but I’m actually better at signing than he is.”

Phil threw back his head and laughed. “Well, Mr. - er…”

“Blake. I’m just Blake.”

Phil took his outstretched hand and shook it. “Well, Blake, I’m glad we have you on set. It’s so amazing to see skills like yours put to great use here. And good luck with you and your boyfriend.”

Blake nodded and opened his mouth as if to ask something, but then his cellphone rang stridently. He grimaced. “Sorry, it’s my boyfriend. It seems like an emergency.”

“Take your time,” said Phil, and moved away to give them privacy. But not before he caught the first few strains of their conversation.

“Hey, dork. How was - _what_? Are you sure? Are you still on campus? Get out of there as fast as you can. Oh my God. Oh my God...get out of there! You might get shot!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *throws cliffhanger celebratory confetti in the air* Sorry, please don’t kill me. Why not comment instead? I promise updates will be frequent, probably even weekly. Even I can’t stand the suspense. ;) ~M


	3. Chapter 3

The shooting had begun less than two and half seconds after Dan had shoved the hearing aids into his pocket. First the guy in front of him, shuffling out of the lecture center with athletic slippers over his socked feet, stopped abruptly in the middle of his path. Dan collided into him from behind and was internally cursing slow-walking people, when another guy and a girl to the side also halted, their eyes wide and mouths open.

Dan glanced about for the source of the consternation. There seemed to be another wave of shock, because then everybody was silently shouting and scattering. Some grabbed their friends by the backpacks and hauled them behind some trees; others tackled their classmates to the grass.

The same frizzy-haired girl from class was suddenly at Dan’s side and tugging at his sleeve. He shook his head violently, unable to read her lips from the rate at which she was yelling. She gestured wildly for a few seconds and then simply pushed him back into the building. A few other quaking students seemed to be doing the same.

Several minutes later, faculty began pouring into the lecture hall, closing windows and shades and shutting off exits. Dan was crushed in the middle of a swaying crowd; he didn’t have to hear their cries to be able to feel the pulse of their fear racing through their veins.

At his side, the girl suddenly released her grip on his shirt. _Sorry_ , she seemed to say.

“What’s going on?” he said. He knew his voice was probably loud for those nearby who could actually hear.

At first the girl gestured at her ears with pointed fingers, but then quickly seemed to change her mind and simply clasped her hands over the sides of her head. Everybody else was mirroring her movement, even the professors who were presumably shouting at everyone to stay calm. The flashing red lights clued Dan in to the possibility that it was the wail of the campus-wide alarm that had everyone covering their ears.

Inexplicably, Dan felt like a dick now for being the only one to unironically not be bothered by the siren.

The girl tapped at his elbow again. He shifted to see that she was now holding up her notebook with her penmanship scrawled across it. _I think there’s been a shooting. The whole place is on lockdown._

“Who? Where?”

She spoke aloud, this time slowing down her words for him to see. _From the direction of the Freeman Apartments._

Shit. That was just across the street. 

Dan plunged his hand into his pocket, first for his phone and then for his hearing aids. The girl was shaking her head vehemently at him not to put them in, but he pointed at the screen of his phone with an apologetic face.

The blast of the alarm pierced his ears like a foot-long needle the second he turned on the hearing aids. It wasn’t just a siren - with the interference of the device, everything in his brain sounded like a high-pitched underwater shriek loud enough to be heard for miles around. Dan slapped his ears impatiently - as if that ever helped - and slowly attempted to push and shoulder his way through the crowd and up the stairs toward a somewhat quieter cove.

_Blake, pick up, please pick up, please have your ringer on._

“Hey, dork,” Blake’s chipper voice greeted him after the fourth ring. “Wasn’t expecting you to call so soon. How was - ”

“Blake, I’m sorry, I’m only calling because there was a shooting and I’m stuck here - ”

“ _What_? Where are you? Are you sure?”

“Yes, it just happened literally ten seconds ago and we’re all locked into one of the buildings.”

“Are you still on campus?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God. Oh, my God. Um - you have to find a way to get out of there. Get out as fast as you can. Oh my God - you might get shot - ”

“Stop panicking, Blake! I’ll be fine. I think.”

“What the _hell_ is that sound?”

“That’s the alarm, dumbass. Look, I just called to let you know in case you didn’t hear from me later. It looks like they might be opening up the doors again soon. I don’t know. I’ll try to get out. Please try not to worry about me.”

“Oh my God,” Blake said again. “You have food with you? And water? There are people there that can help you? And you have the spare batteries for your hearing aids?”

“ _Yes_ , Blake,” Dan lied. He tried not to let the smile show through his voice. “Aren’t you at work? Go back to work.”

“I was just talking to the director. It’s fine, I told him it was an emergency. I can stay on the line with you.”

 _I’d really like that_ , Dan almost said, but instead he suppressed the clenching of his stomach and replied, “I’ll be okay, I promise. Go back to work. I’ll text you soon.”

“ _Dan_.” The sudden and overwhelming urgency in Blake’s voice, louder than his usual panicky nature, stopped Dan from hanging up at that second.

“Yeah.”

“Dan, _do you feel all right_?”

Blake had remembered - but of course he would remember. It would be somewhat hard to forget that your boyfriend had gone deaf because of guns.

Dan swallowed the lump in his throat, and he mustered the bravest voice he could. “Yes, I feel fine. Wait for my text, okay?”

“Okay. I love you.”

~

The tail end of Phil’s high-pitched little laugh led the way into the introduction of his newest vlog posting. The camera had nearly slipped from his hand and onto his face while he was on his back across the plush duvet of the hotel bed, causing him to yelp and cover his face. The black-rimmed glasses suffered a bit of a beating from the small accident, but it was nothing too serious as to require tape or another adjustment at the optician’s any time soon.

“Hi, guys!” Phil chirped in the video. “Sorry about that. Almost dropped my cam on my face. I can’t be bother to sit up at the moment, though; I’ll just turn my hand so you guys can see what my hotel room looks like.” He swiveled his wrist, making sure to capture the baroque details of every accent piece, and then refocused the lens on himself. “So yes, I’m in a small hotel in Seattle at the moment - don’t stalk me! Haha. I just had a wonderful first day filming my upcoming movie. And everyone was - I don’t know, so kind and devoted to the project, I guess. Not that I was expecting any less. But it was a really lovely surprise to be able to work with people who were all so equally passionate about their jobs. I mean, YouTubers are all super passionate and so am I, but like I got all those tingly butterfly feelings as soon as I stepped on set. This is so legit, guys. I’m a director now!” The pitch of Phil’s voice inevitably slid a few notches up at the end of his sentence.

“But anyway, sorry about the rambling. I’m posting this video mainly to make a big announcement: I’m going to be at VidCon again this year! Yayyy!” Phil giggled a bit. He wasn’t sure yet how much of that undignified sound he was going to edit out. “Not like I’m ever going to skip going to VidCon, but you guys at least deserve the official announcement, right? So, for the details! I’ve gotten word that the shows will be all across California again this year, starting with Anaheim this June - that’s literally one month away! ...Anyway, I’ll post the link with the specific locations down in the description below. I’m so excited to meet everyone again there!”

Phil had to stop and take a deep breath. Definitely a jump cut there. He hadn’t realized how worked up he gotten himself until he was nearly gasping at the end of his sentence. Facing the camera again, he said cheerily, “But there’s more! Right after I tour you around the outside of the hotel, I’ll show you guys some clips of me and my colleagues working behind the scenes on the set. Everybody was just _great_ to work with…”

The vlog was probably going to end up being over forty minutes long and a beast to edit, but Phil didn’t mind. With his fans knowing that he would be preoccupied for a few months directing the film, they at least deserved to have plenty of footage of his experience.

True to his word, Phil took the cam to the balcony and gave everyone a panning shot of the blinking street lights and the dozens of cars quietly zooming by. He wasn’t wearing shoes - only the usual mismatched socks - but he ventured downstairs anyway to the lobby, where he ran into some of the crew still lounging. He gave them a wave, pointed the camera cursorily at them, and then finished the outside tour.

The crew had disappeared from the lounge when he came back inside, and the loud voices seemed to have moved upstairs to the suite that several of the cameramen shared next to his room. A sudden thought occurred to Phil, and quickly he shut off the camera before knocking.

It was Blake, still a shock of plaid flannel and blonde fringe, who opened the door.

“Oh, hey again! Just the...man I was looking for. Sorry, that sounded hideously inappropriate and I don’t even know why,” Phil laughed.

Blake grinned back. “That’s okay. Are all British people as good with words as you are? You know what, never mind, don’t answer that. What’s up?”

“Um, well…” Phil glanced over Blake’s shoulder, where a bunch of the crewmen were guffawing over something and toasting drinks, and a few others were sprawled on couches watching the evening game.

Blake took the hint, slipped on his Converse, and stepped out into the narrow hallway, letting the door shut behind him. Suddenly his hands - long-fingered and calloused - were stuffed into his pockets. Phil knew instantly that Blake wasn’t stupid and had likely already figured out what this was about.

“So about your boyfriend.” Phil cleared his throat. “This also sounds massively inappropriate, sort of, but I kind of couldn’t help overhearing a tidbit of your phone conversation earlier when we met. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, there was a shooting at the UCLA campus where he had class this morning. He got stuck in a lockdown for a while, but they managed to get out. He texted me afterward. Nothing to worry about, Director.”

“Stop calling me Director!” Phil sighed with a smile, temporarily distracted from the conversation. “Are you sure he’s okay? Would you, I don’t know, perhaps like to take some days off to check on him and make sure everything’s all right?”

Blake stared at him incredulously, and then the crinkles around his eyes all smoothed at once in a wave of relief. “Dear God, I thought you were going to suspend me or - or fire me, or some shit like that. Wow. Sorry. Is that all?”

Phil was already joining in on his laugh. “Yeah, that’s all. I was just getting worried that there was something urgent you had to attend to and you might have been, er, too afraid to ask.”

“Um.” Blake was still chuckling behind a hand. “Yeah, no, before this happened I’d already told Christina that I needed to go home tomorrow, Tuesday that is, and take care of some other, er, medical stuff.” Christina was the assistant director. Blake went on to explain, “She knows I’m coming back the Monday after. That’s all right with you, right? She already told you?”

Phil checked his mental notes and calendars - not that he should have expected his memory to serve him on demand like that. “She probably did, I think she mentioned a couple of people actually who’d be on and off the set. Don’t worry about it. Are you leaving straightaway in the morning?”

“More like noontime. I can work some in the morning if you need me.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Phil. “I was just checking if the hangover would bother you too much on the flight home if we had a couple drinks right now. Only if you want to, of course. I’m guessing you’re tired.”

Blake raised one ashy brow, as if trying to discern if Phil was hitting on him or merely lonely. It only took him a second to decide on the latter, and he shrugged in assent. 

Several minutes later found the two men hunched over at the bar downstairs, lazily staring down into their glasses. Blake was chuckling. “Are you actually serious right now? I can’t believe this is your directorial debut. Wow. Must have missed the memo.”

Phil wiped his mouth, which was curved up in a lopsided smile. “I was pretty sure everyone on set knew by now.”

“Wow,” Blake said again. “So what got you into the business?”

“I took a degree in English.”

The blonde guy practically spat out his drink in laughter at that. “Oh God. Oh, my God. Are the jokes about English as bad across the ocean as they are here?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Have you seen The Weakest Link?” When Blake shook his head no, Phil explained, “It’s a game show back home. I appeared in one episode during my years at uni, and the hostess was pretty mean about my degree. And when I had to explain that I wanted to be in media, it was, er, kinda difficult to describe exactly what a YouTube career looks like.”

“You’re a YouTuber? Like, famous and shit?”

Phil covered his eyes and laughed self-consciously. “Maybe.” _So was my best friend_ , he almost said.

“Wow. Sorry I didn’t recognize you. Sadly, I don’t watch that stuff,” said Blake. “But maybe I’ll check you out sometime.” He took another draught of his glass, almost draining it. “You know, it’s been my dream to be famous.”

That perked Phil’s interest. “Really?”

“Yeah. Not just like internet popular. Like famous-famous.”

“Like Beyoncé.”

“Sort of.”

“Leonardo diCaprio, then.”

Blake snapped his fingers and pointed at Phil with a grin. “Exactly. I’m a shit actor, though.”

“So maybe get some experience with your camerawork and then branch out and make your own films,” Phil suggested. “Or get on YouTube!”

Blake guffawed. “Nice try. Well, my boyfriend’s the exact opposite. He said he used to be sort of famous, but he got tired of it all and left it behind.”

Phil pursed his lips. “Bold move.”

“Well, I support him in whatever he does. He’s gone back to school to study to be a freelance writer and he seems to be adjusting pretty well so far.”

~

The stuffiness of the cubicled offices of the _LA Times_ was starting to make Dan think he was so much less than adjusted to his new world.

The sky outside had been jarringly bright when Dan and the rest of the students were finally released from the lecture center. He hadn’t been sure quite what he had been expecting - his phone told him it was barely noontime, but it had felt like hours or even days waiting inside in the dimness of two hundred people heavily breathing in the same room.

After texting Blake as promised, Dan had halted in his steps by the bus stop, briefly considering calling in absent on account of the hullabaloo on campus. After all, everyone had to have heard of the incident by now, especially a newspaper company. But despite the troubled misgivings in the pit of his stomach, Dan knew that he would only retreat too far inside his head if he went home now, and so against the will of his own body he boarded the bus going into the city.

Introductions were fuss-free, at least. He was paired with a rookie journalist by the name of Eddie Suarez, a muscular but nervous young man probably a few years younger than him, sporting the fashionable yuppie quiff and tight blue chino pants about an inch too short for him. Dan towered over him by at least a head, but as usual with his limbs never knowing where to place themselves, he still managed to look ten times more awful than Eddie at dithering around the cubicle.

Eddie made a few pathetic attempts at typing at his ancient keyboard before glancing up again at Dan, who was drumming his knees against the underside of their wrap-around desk as he pretended to flip through the paper folders their boss had given him to organize. Eddie cleared his throat. “So, you’re in college? What year are you?”

“Almost a junior,” Dan mumbled.

“Oh, that’s nice. You’re almost done. Have you always wanted to be in journalism?”

Dan responded with a noncommittal shrug, closed the folder, and turned to fully face him. “Started out with law a long time ago, then took time off. But yeah, I think I’ll stick with this.”

Eddie chuckled. “Today is pretty slow, but a lot of times it’s busier and you get to see a bit of action. Probably a little more than you’d…” 

Dan squinted. There was a sharp whine in his ears and then nothing, but Eddie’s mouth was still moving. Shit. He should have listened to Blake and brought the extra batteries.

 _A little more than you’d see doing law, huh_? Eddie was saying.

Just then a shadow fell over the desk, and Dan jerked his head up to see their boss Warren, the assistant editor, standing over both of them. Warren motioned with a hand at Dan. _Come with me._

Dan jumped out of his seat, effectively knocking over the pile of folders balanced on the edge of the desk, and as the apologies spilled out of him and he tried to crouch down to pick everything up, Eddie laid a hand on his shoulder and motioned at him to go. When Dan turned, Warren was rolling his eyes and barking something impatiently.

A string of imprecations was all Dan could think off as he trailed behind Warren, who was clipping ahead at a brisk pace. Warren soon stopped in front of an open little room - more like a large closet - cluttered with copying machines and office supplies. Shelves of cardboard boxes stuffed with files reached nearly to the ceiling, lining every wall. Warren pulled one out and produced several folders from it.

 _I need you to…_ Warren was still evidently talking, but he kept moving his head back and forth as he glanced first at the pages and then up at Dan, making it close to impossible to read what he was saying. Copy the sheets? Was that what he was supposed to do? But which ones? The acrid taste of anxiety spiked in the back of Dan’s throat.

“Could you - could you slow down a bit, perhaps, please?” he tried in his most placating voice.

Warren turned and stared at him. _Copy these files_ , he repeated again, obviously slowing down and exaggerating his speech as if Dan were a child. Dan’s cheeks were already hot and damp with humiliation. He suddenly wished Eddie, jittery and quiff-haired young Eddie, were here to back him up.

 _Don’t do the backs of these, just…_ There he went turning his head again. Dan wanted to scream in frustration.

“Sir, maybe you could face me when you talk? I’m terribly sorry, I really am. It’s just my hearing aids got discharged - ”

Warren rounded on him then with a bug-eyed look somewhere halfway between a horrified gape and a bull-like glare. _You’re deaf?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: First off, thank you so much for all the hearts and comments! It means a lot to me to be welcomed to the phandom like this. :) Also, I know I said I’d update ‘very soon’ when I replied to everybody’s reviews, but unfortunately I, uh, forgot that I’d be finishing up writing my thesis (in Spanish, no less) this past week. And then I was busy writing this chapter all day yesterday, but then I actually fell asleep before I got a chance to post. Tehe. At any rate, hope you like! What are you thoughts? How do you think Dan got involved with guns? And it looks like his first experience at the office isn’t going over so well - has he really chosen the right field?


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: There's a scene with drug use in the last third of this chapter.

A frosty pink petal, crinkled on the edges and not fully in bloom, fluttered on the breeze and landed on Dan’s chest. He almost missed it - he was lying inert across a park bench with his eyes open only a crack - but the petal slid down to the skin of his wrist where it lay across his stomach, and that was when he felt it.

Groaning silently, Dan pulled his eyelids open and fished around his pocket for his phone to check the time. He’d been lazing about here in the park for nearly two hours. He should go home, he knew, or maybe grab something to eat before leaving, but everything felt so melded together. Time didn’t matter. Nothing did. No one knew him here and he likewise knew no one to go home to, and everything about him was purposeless.

Granted, the encounter with Warren had not ended too favorably, but at least it hadn’t been as nauseating as he had half-expected it to be. He was suspended from the internship - “temporarily,” they had said - until he could provide documentation from his doctor that he was able to function perfectly well in a professional setting with his hearing aids. Warren had blustered on and on about something concerning his integrity, claiming Dan hadn’t mentioned his disability in his application. For his part, Dan, being the ill-fated loser that he already knew he was, hadn’t exactly counted on his bosses finding out this soon.

“How could you have been so bloody stupid?” he muttered to himself.

Dan switched on his phone screen again. Half past six, and he hadn’t eaten anything. He really should get a sandwich and maybe grab a few batteries from the convenience store - just so he didn’t have to search through his whole flat for the spare ones - but no physical need at the moment could motivate him enough to move. Instead, he flipped through his apps and pulled up YouTube.

 _Phil is not on fire_ , he typed into the search bar, before he even really knew what he was doing.

It was the first time he had watched the video without sound. Closed captions didn’t help, being nothing more than a muddle of misinterpreted gibberish - Christ, he wished he and Phil had worked on the subtitles before for all their videos. He shuddered internally at how insensitive they had been to their disabled fans.

But the uncomfortable thought slid away quickly, because now he was caught up in analyzing every second of the video, unaware of the faint and wistful smile he had on, and he couldn’t get past his god-awful fringe from 2009 and all the hand hearts he and Phil held up to the camera. And the licking. God, there was way too much tongue action going on. Still, he knew he was giggling more times than he would like to admit.

They’d argued about which side of the bed to sleep on, he remembered, that first night he spent at Phil’s house in Manchester. Not just argued, but had a proper full-blown pillow fight.

And then his brain shot to the next memory that somehow always seemed to link to that one: that day back in 2010 when he and Phil were in the middle of the mall and almost kissed for the second time but never did.

_“You need to stop being shy and lie down somewhere more noticeable, Dan,” Phil chuckled, letting the videocam shake a little in his hand._

_“Oh, come on, wasn’t the one on the lift great? I think it’s bloody hilarious. You saw that old lady’s face.”_

_Phil sighed and closed the cam to preserve its battery. “Only 10 percent left,” he explained. “I don’t know, we need more people to see you…”_

_Dan grinned cockily. “That’s great, Phil, remember the last time we went into town for the first Truth or Dare video and you couldn’t even bear to stand on the street to film me?”_

_“But that’s different! I’m just your cameraman. You’re the one doing the dare, not me.”_

_“Aha, sensitive topic?” Dan nudged him playfully in the ribs, wanting to ensure that Phil knew he was only jesting, but still unwilling to let the matter go._

_“Oh, shut up.”_

_“You can’t make me!”_

_“Literally, I will eat all your cereal while you’re sleeping if you don’t stop.”_

_“Lucky Charms glutton.”_

_“That sounds incredibly dirty, Dan…”_

_“Sorry, sorry.” Dan really was apologetic. Among his many undesired talents, one of the peskiest ones was his knack for saying dirty-sounding things at the most innocuous and inappropriate times._

_“Maybe we should stop to get a coffee first,” Phil was saying._

_Dan frowned. “I thought you said the camera’s at 10 percent. Maybe let’s head over to the carousel and do it there, yeah?”_

_They plodded over to the other side of the mall together, lanky arms swinging and brushing against each other every so often, and though Dan knew the contact had to be purely accidental he still couldn’t deny the spark it sent flying into his heart. He had to stop doing that. It was over a year since he and Phil had met in person, and he still wasn’t over how beautiful his best friend was._

_“That horse looks like you, Dan!” Phil beckoned and pointed from a few paces ahead._

_“Shut up.”_

_“No, look! It’s even got the same fringe and dimple!”_

_“What the hell, Phil, that’s not a dimple!”_

_He hadn’t realized he had come up to stand so close next to Phil until their hands suddenly collided with each other. His heart lurched. But Phil seemed unfazed; he grabbed Dan’s hand childishly and made it stroke the painted brown fringe of the metal unicorn. “See? It’s a unicorn, just like you.”_

_“You’re just projecting on me. Everyone knows I’m the one with the soul of a black hole and you’re the one who literally shits rainbows.”_

_“But black holes need rainbows too, sometimes, Dan.”_

__Black holes just eat rainbows, silly, _Dan almost said, but the words were suddenly frozen on his tongue. His face was so close to Phil’s - when had that even happened? He let out his breath in a small puff of air, and he could have sworn he felt Phil’s sharp inhalation in response. Their noses were almost touching. Dan’s eyes flitted to Phil’s lips, already parted and quivering, and his mind was racing with a million permutations of_ was Phil thinking the same thing? __

_It was like eternity. Dan leaned in, and then all of a sudden, as if he were coming up to the surface of the water in a time-warped rush, he turned back to face the carousel. He chickened._

_He didn’t know why he did it. He’d been the first one to kiss Phil in the snow last year, after all. Dan knew he would be beating himself up over the perfectly shattered moment for months to come. Maybe he should apologize. Hell, maybe he should even just come out with it and ask Phil directly if he thought they were going to kiss. There were a thousand things he could have said to salvage what was left of the lost seconds. But he didn’t say them. None of them._

_What he said instead was, “Let’s go get that last sequence in, yeah?”_

~

Tuesday lectures went by uneventfully. Dan got back to his apartment without incident and dithered about for a few hours, checking the news and watching some _Game of Thrones_ reruns before glancing up at the clock for the first time since he’d been home. Blake would be dropping by directly after his flight landed, and Dan still had time to cook up something before his arrival.

Dan was in the middle of spooning out the sauce over the spaghetti when the custom light hooked up to his doorbell blinked several times. He’d told Blake countless times before to just key himself in, but Blake always insisted on using the deaf bell first so as to never startle him. This was one of those times Dan appreciated Blake’s solicitousness, since being essentially crept up on from behind while he was handling tomato sauce wasn’t likely to have ended terribly well.

Dan turned on his hearing aids then and padded over to open the door. “Jeez, don’t tell me you came up all those stairs carrying those!”

“I needed the exercise!” Blake was sweaty and slightly gasping, but in Dan’s opinion the rosy flush in his cheeks merely complemented his golden fringe plastered to his forehead.

“You mean the lift was broken.”

The quirk in Blake’s mouth gave it all away.

“You literally could have texted me and I would have come down to help you,” said Dan.

Blake simply gave him a look, and their mouths twitched once before they burst out laughing.

“Oh, who am I even fooling?” Dan moaned, as he reached forward to grab one of the duffels from Blake’s hands and inevitably felt his shoulder crack from the weight.

“Easy, just drop it in the corner, please,” Blake directed him. “I don’t want you breaking anything.”

“Right, because _God forbid_ a six-foot-three male adult actually be able to carry anything over twenty pounds.”

“You made spaghetti?”

Dan straightened, knowing Blake had said something. “What?”

“You made us spaghetti? How domestic,” Blake repeated, signing along with his hands as he spoke.

Dan shrugged. “I personally know what it feels like to disembark from any hellhole of an airplane with nothing but peanuts and dried fish inside me,” he deadpanned back, also signing. It was comfortable like this, being able to talk to someone with his aids on but also knowing he could fall back on signing if he misheard or misread anything. Blake took the cue and continued the speak-and-sign pattern throughout the rest of the evening, as he usually did whenever they were alone together.

“So first things first, the campus was safe after the shooting incident? Weren’t classes canceled today?” Blake asked as they settled into place at the dinette and dug into their dinner.

His mouth a little too full of pasta and Ragu, Dan simply shook his head. _Nobody was killed or seriously hurt_ , he signed. After gulping down his mouthful, he said, “But it’s all good. How was the filming?”

“Wait, I haven’t even gotten to ask about your internship yet!” Blake protested.

“Oh. That.” Dread stirred back to life in the pit of Dan’s stomach.

“Oh man, don’t tell me they were assholes to you.”

“Not really.” Dan shrugged. “Not the guy I’m shadowing, anyway, or the top boss. But I never get to see the editor. My boss is the assistant editor, and he sort of found out too early that I’m deaf.”

“Do I even want to know how?”

Dan groaned and leaned back in his chair, already facepalming. “I didn’t bring the extra batteries with me…”

“ _Dan_! You told me you did!”

“Sorry?” Dan glanced up at him through the crack between his fingers. Blake was shaking with what seemed to be silent laughter, but he couldn’t be too sure, because his face was also contorted in some comical permutation of worry. 

Blake finally cracked into a grin, his hair flopping over his eyes. Dan was struck by the sudden and disconcerting nausea of recognition. That was exactly how Phil used to grin and flip his fringe.

“So what’d he make you do, desk work and no phones or any form of human contact?”

“Uh...more like suspended me.” At Blake’s spluttering, Dan hurried to tack on, “Temporarily, until I procure doctor’s documentation that I’m, I don’t know, fit to socialize in work environments, I guess.”

“That is _so_ discriminatory!” Blake exclaimed. “I could literally pull a case against their ass right now - ”

“No, no, no, that won’t be necessary,” said Dan in a tiny voice.

“Why the hell not? Fine, if you’re not going to sue them, I’m going over there with you tomorrow to give that assistant editor of yours a good, serious talk about equal opportunity employment.”

The heat was blossoming everywhere under the skin of Dan’s face and neck. “It’s an internship,” he corrected Blake, his tone still subdued. “And I already said okay. Please, I can handle this on my own.”

“But, but - oh, fine.” Blake heaved a sigh and set down his fork with a clank. He knew exactly how Dan felt about being babied, especially after everything they had gone through together. Independence and the ability to make his own decisions were the two key things he had promised to give Dan, without exception, after they’d started dating and sorted out his issues.

“Well, enough of that sad and pathetic story that is my life,” said Dan with a top-notch sarcasm in his cheery smile. “How was your filming?”

Blake cast him an uncertain glance, his sky blue irises pulsing, as if wondering if he should press the issue further or just answer the question. Finally he said, “It was actually really great. The director seems to like me and we got along pretty well. The way things are going, I may even become a supervising cameraman in no time. He really seems to think I’ve got some talent.”

“Which you do. Is Seattle fun?”

“Rainy and cold. We were lucky to have a sunny day and good lighting for the main opening scenes. Oh, wait.” Blake stood and padded over to his backpack that was resting against the corner of the kitchen doorway, and reached into one of the concealed pockets inside. “I got this surprise on my way here. It’s enough for both of us.”

Dan glanced over his shoulder to catch sight of the clear plastic zip bags in Blake’s fingers. It looked like a pretty good quality hit from his judgment.

“Sorry my surprise was so...cheesy in comparison,” he half-joked, indicating their now empty dinner plates.

“Dan, stop. I wasn’t even expecting you to cook, I thought we were gonna grab some sandwiches and then have a hit and some TV. I know you’ve been on edge lately - don’t deny it,” he added, when Dan opened his mouth to protest - “and I know you haven’t smoked in a while. So here. It’ll help you relax some, I promise.”

Dan stared at the packet for a few seconds, and then finally nodded and took it. “Don’t worry about the dishes, though. And thanks.”

Twenty minutes later found them curled up loosely against each other on the couch in front of the TV, not really focused on the screen but rather at each other through the diaphanous veil of smoke hanging around them. Dan couldn’t stop thinking about how dilated Blake’s pupils right now, and how they looked like two impossibly black whirlpools surrounded by celestial rings of blue. Almost like Phil’s - no. He couldn’t go there.

Blake was talking. And talking and talking and talking. God, he never shut up when he was high, not even when he was just lightly buzzed. Dan zoned in and out, only registering that Blake was still narrating his experiences on set.

Dan found himself frowning. “You stayed up drinking with this director guy?”

“Didn’t stay up, exactly. He was the one who invited me downstairs. Lonely, I guess. He also came to see if I was okay” - Blake’s sentence dissolved here into some mumbled explanation that didn’t make sense - “and then we just got to talking about careers and movies and life in general and man, he said some inspiring shit. Real easy guy to talk to…”

“So you just talked.” Dan already hated himself for the snappy tone. In the back of his mind, he knew he got irritable and obsessively pedantic when he was high, but right now that ugly shade of envy was painting everything he was hearing.

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know, it sounds like you shared so much with this director guy.”

“So?”

“So?” Dan repeated incredulously. He lifted his head to stare at Blake, but regretted it when a dull ache bloomed at the base of his skull at the sudden movement. He was feeling - God, he didn’t know what to feel. There was an inexplicable amusement behind it all, and maybe a hint of peaceful euphoria, but at the same time it was tainted by that innate cynicism that was being overexpressed inside him now. And then he recognized, vaguely, some form of paranoia thrown into the mix.

“Stop being like that, it was only a couple of drinks,” Blake mumbled. “I thought last time I checked, I had the right to make friends outside our circle.”

“You literally spilled your guts to this guy a day after meeting him.”

“So did you, Dan. After you met me.”

Dan bolted to his feet. He nearly lost his balance - everything was beginning to spin, whether from the hit or from the movement or from his rage, he didn’t know anymore - and for a moment he felt like he was floating on the floor, all six feet and three inches of him, towering over Blake who suddenly looked very small where he was huddled on the couch. Dan felt like a god, or maybe an avenger, some stupid symbol of righteous indignation. “That was different!” he hissed.

“God, Dan, stop overreacting. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Of course you didn’t mean it that way. You never mean it that way.” Dan couldn’t believe that after all this time, Blake would just throw that in his face like it meant nothing, the memory of how they had met on the bridge past midnight and he had been on the brink of stepping over the edge into nothingness.

Blake was on his feet now, too, glaring up into Dan’s eyes. “Why are you such a possessive and jealous boyfriend? Why can’t you just be supportive, for once? You asked me not to meddle with your issue at the internship and I _agreed_. Now what’s wrong with me going out with friends and having a little bit of fun when I’m lonely and we’re far apart and I’m stuck in the middle of rainy goddamn Seattle?”

“So it was more than one friend?” said Dan.

“ _God_ , Dan! I hate you! You know that’s not what I meant!”

 _I hate me too!_ Dan would have said, but it was too vile and it stuck in his throat. “Well, if you hate me so much, then maybe you should just leave.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.” Blake turned away quickly so Dan would not see the moisture abruptly pooling in his eyes, and he moved with swift and jerky movements to gather his backpack and his duffel bags, not even bothering to zip them. “What a shame, I was even going to ask you to move in with me tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oh look, it’s another chapter uploaded in the same week! Look who’s being all responsible and writing instead of studying for her exam tomorrow. By the way, I thought I'd just mention that this story is really special to me, considering that I have partial hearing loss (deaf in one ear, ugh, it's a pain sometimes), and not only is the deaf!Dan au really fun to work with in terms of characterization, but I also feel like this is an opportunity to spread some awareness about people with hearing disabilities and the kinds of discriminations they face and also how awesome they are and all that jazz. :)  
> But first, let’s take a step back...a Phan flashback *and* smoking pot *and* fighting *and* a dramatic bombshell all in one chapter? Please don’t kill me, guys! Why not give me feedback instead? :D


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry for the late update. I’m trying to post every Sunday/Monday, but remember that exam I had at the end of last week? Yeah. I actually studied loads for that and still got a bad grade. :( Then my mum kind of yelled at me and of course that made things worse so I ended up having a little bit of a panic attack and spent the whole day secretly crying/worrying I wasn’t going to ever get into the PhD program of my dreams and thinking I would end up being a bum with my chosen degree and then also kind of wanting to die so yeah there was that… :/ And then my advisor gave me back my first draft of my Spanish thesis with a bunch of comments (mostly really encouraging ones!) but she also wanted me to consider adding 10 pages so I was like DRAT, write 10 pages *and* study to get 100 on my next exam so I can keep my GPA up? But I’m back on track now and I really felt comforted writing this chapter, so… OH AND BEFORE I FORGET *SHRIEKS* CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE DISS TRACK VIDEO? YES? YES. IT WAS UHMAZING. AM I RIGHT OR AM I RIGHT. IT WAS PROBABLY THE SINGLE BEST THING TO HAPPEN THIS WEEK AND IT MADE EVERYTHING ELSE I WAS FEELING JUST GO AWAY. IF ONLY MY CLASSMATES WOULDN’T KILL ME I’D MAKE THAT TRACK MY NEW RINGTONE. OKAY? OKAY. GOOD TALK.
> 
> Warning: Depressive thoughts and more drugs ensue after Dan goes to his bedroom. Also mentions of vomit.

“What are your plans for the summer, while you’re here in Seattle filming?” asked the ginger-haired reporter, flipping through her note cards with a grin that felt familiar and comforting and easily helped Phil to relax. He was rather enjoying this interview.

Phil leaned forward in his armchair, remembering to make brief eye contact with the viewer through the camera to the side. “Oh, loads! It’s busy on set, but never too busy for me to get away and explore everything. I’ve heard of this Mongolian place downtown that I’m dying to try - and I’m going to try every quintessential American food too, I promise. And an amusement park if I can fit it in my schedule, plus meeting fans and preparing for VidCon, of course. That’s my top priority at this moment, along with the filming.”

“What a smooth segue!” the reporter grinned, holding a thumbs up.

“Thanks, Gwen.”

“Yeah, so speaking of VidCon, any surprises you have in store for us?”

“Not in the conventional sense of the word, I guess, no. I myself don’t really know what’s going to go down at VidCon this year, but whatever it is, I’m sure it’s going to be awesome. After all, what I do bring to the table is usually unexpected.”

“Just part of the AmazingPhil brand, right?”

“Yes. And lions.”

“Oh, is that the surprise, then? You’re bringing a lion? Or two or three?”

Phil’s mouth quirked upward and he cast a comically shifty glance at the camera. “Maybe.” At that point, they both looked at one another and burst into a comfortable round of laughter.

“But in all seriousness, Phil,” said Gwen, sobering up. “Has it come to your attention that some of your fans have been expecting you to bring someone special with you this year to VidCon?”

Phil was nonplussed for a second. “What? No. Who?”

Gwen chuckled. “Well, Danisnotonfire, of course.”

Oh. That blasted video. Though the falter in Phil’s smile was hardly perceptible, he gave a gigantic internal wince. He chuckled back, uneasily this time, trying to drag out the seconds before he inevitably had to offer a coherent answer. “Right. Danisnotonfire. Dan. Dan Howell. Of course.”

To her credit, the reporter intuitively picked up on the fact that something was amiss, and she used her charm to make a clever quip to the camera, giving Phil those critical ten more seconds to think things through.

“Yeah, we’ll see about that,” Phil finally said, quietly.

Gwen nodded in understanding. “He’s been on a long hiatus, I’m sure coming with you to a public event again would be a massive change,” she replied, filling in the blanks. “I can’t say the fans won’t be disappointed, but I agree that it should be up to the two of you.” She shuffled through her cards and held up a printout of some screenshotted fan tweets, and she read aloud some of the most hilarious ones to shake up the sudden tension that had descended palpably in the room.

“Now this is a slightly more personal question, and I apologize in advance, Phil,” said Gwen, after they’d shared another laugh. Phil nodded at her to go on. “You don’t have to answer this if you prefer not to, of course. But on the serious side of things, even though fans were happy to see you and Dan back together on your gaming channel last month, they’ve also expressed concern, especially since Dan’s social media outlets have still remained inactive. So how’s Dan feeling? How’s everything? I hope everything’s all right.”

Phil knew deep down that she meant no ill by it, but the question still stabbed him in the gut. He hadn’t lied - not really - but he hadn’t exactly told Gwen that that footage had been over three years old when he uploaded it. For some time he had harbored the vain hope that perhaps his gaffe would blow over, but no, luck had never been with him in these critical times. It served him right, he supposed, trying to pretend he was still living his old life with his former best friend and roommate.

“Er, I can’t say exactly, I mean, I don’t think Dan would want me to speak for him. Not on this issue, and not for most other things, for that matter,” Phil hedged. As always, his tone was polite and he softened his words with a signature smile, but he made sure that he was direct enough to the point that Gwen took the hint and steered the direction of the interview toward safer, more Phil-centric topics.

He sat in a slight daze throughout the rest of the conversation after that. _Oh my God_ , he thought. _Oh, God. This is real. Dan really isn’t going to come back. He’s...gone._

It was absurd, really - anyone could have told him Dan had effectively moved on, and they _had_ told him; he remembered vaguely his inebriated conversation with Louise - but Phil simply refused to listen. Heck, it had been three years. If Dan had ever had the intentions of showing up on their doorstep again, he would have done it ages ago. Phil’s heart squeezed a little inside his chest as he sank deeper and deeper into the sand pit of guilt and shock - why was he only coming to this epiphany now? - and the thing that surprised him the most was how true it was that emotional pain actually caused physical hurt. He wished he could be anywhere but here in front of Gwen, in front of the five strange crewmen, in front of those damned cameras that would record every last second of unerasable emotion on his face.

~

Dan only waited the half-minute it took for Blake to grab the rest of his bags, step outside, and slam the door behind him, before he found himself shuffling woodenly to his bedroom and sinking onto his bed. The floating sensation in his brain wasn’t welcome anymore; it was disconcerting, irritating, because underneath the false euphoria he knew he was angry. And he knew he would be angry the next morning too, perhaps even angrier, and he knew his head would hurt like hell and he wouldn’t want to hear anything the outside world had to offer him. He switched off his hearing aids, took them off, and chucked them unceremoniously into the dark void, where he presumed they would land somewhere on his desk.

He had his legs tucked up slightly to his chest, his heels balanced on the bed frame, and with a weary sigh he rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face into his lap. He felt like he should be crying. He always cried so easily when he was emotional. But the weed was keeping his eyes dry, and for once he actually wished he could weep just so he could be over and done with it and the exhaustion could take over and submerge him in unconsciousness.

 _This is exactly what happens when you try to make a new life_ , he told himself. _New lives don’t exist because you never killed your demons. They’re always there to haunt you. What even made you think for a second you could truly be happy again?_

Without realizing it, Dan shook his head violently against the thoughts. He needed something stronger to stave them off. After what felt like an hour of listening to an eternal loop of his own voice inside his brain, Dan reached over to turn on his lamp, pulled out a drawer from his nightstand, and fished around for the bottle of pills. He’d been to one therapist after Blake’s insistence, more than a year ago, and he hadn’t gone back since - but the therapist had handed him a prescription for Xanax which Dan later filled, unbeknownst to Blake. That batch hadn’t lasted very long. Then, out of some odd stroke of fortune, Dan had fallen up a flight of concrete stairs on campus, and the doctor had prescribed him some Vicodin for the stress fracture in his shin.

Ugh, pills. Dan searched through another drawer until he found the leftover bottle of water from yesterday. He shook out first two, then three of the small white oval pills onto his palm, and after sucking in a deep breath placed them on his tongue.

The light was streaming unapologetically in blinding ribbons across the carpet when Dan’s eyes finally cracked open. The unconventional view of the cobwebbed corner in his ceiling was what yanked him fully awake. He wasn’t in his bed, or even hunched over at his desk as he sometimes was when he fell asleep studying. He was flat on his back on the carpet, and he could smell last night’s smoke everywhere.

Dan gave a groan and a cough before dragging himself into an upright sitting position. The pill bottle was still nestled on its side in the folds of his gray duvet. After another several minutes of staring and struggling to find his body amid the floating haze, he finally stood up to put away the pills and the water bottle. The sudden rush of blood from his head was disorienting, and he swayed on his feet before jerking his door open and stumbling out in the direction of the bathroom.

“Ow! Fuck - Dan?”

Dan hadn’t heard him, but rather tripped over the hunched up figure of none other than Blake on the other side of the door. There was no time to register his surprise. Dan wobbled to the toilet, slammed the door, and retched.

Blake staggered to his feet and rapped on the door. “Dan? Are you okay?” When there was no reply except the unmistakable croak of someone heaving inside, Blake knocked again. “Dan! What’s going on? Why’s the door locked? I need to make sure you’re okay. Dan? Just breathe, okay? Take it easy.”

Dan didn’t hear any of Blake’s panicked speech, but vaguely he did feel the vibrations in the tiles as his boyfriend pounded on the door. “Go away!” he managed to shout at last, his throat feeling hoarse and wretched.

Barely a minute passed when suddenly the door swung open. Dan was still on his knees in front of the toilet, eyes closed and breathing heavy. He felt a soft hand massaging his shoulder and finally looked up.

Blake was gazing down at him with an apology written all over his blue eyes. In his other hand he held up a penny as if in explanation of how he’d managed to unlock the door.

Blake set the coin down on the sink and started to speak and sign. “Sorry. I didn’t know you had your aids off. Are you okay?”

Dan gave a glum nod. He was still angry at Blake, he remembered somewhere in the back of his mind, but right now he was too tired.

“Was it the smoke we had last night?”

Dan shook his head and closed his eyes again, leaning back on his heels. Stars were dancing lazily behind his lids. “Maybe something I ate,” he said at last. It was barely a whisper.

Blake nudged him to get him to look up again. “I’m sorry if I upset you. I know I was being a prick last night.”

Dan didn’t know how to respond to that. Blake knew him too well to buy the _I-must-be-throwing-up-because-of-something-I-ate_ excuse, of course. He had vomited more times than he would have liked to admit after Blake had brought him home from that night at the bridge. At first Blake would always rush into the bathroom to make sure he was all right, but after Dan had lashed out in his humiliation, Blake simply pretended - against his better judgment - not to hear the late-night retching.

So Dan didn’t say anything this time, either. He got up, flushed the toilet, and began to wash his hands and face as if nothing had happened.

Blake was signing again when Dan glanced up at their reflection in the vanity mirror. _I’ll have breakfast ready in five minutes. You need to eat. And we need to talk_.

Dan didn’t want to talk. Hell, he would much rather have prefered to lie back down in that sunny patch of carpet with his face to the floor for the next sixteen hours. But the smell of pancakes and fresh coffee wafting toward him from the kitchen was enough to stir his guilt, and reluctantly he padded over to the dining table.

“Don’t you want to put your aids on?” Blake said and signed, setting the plates down. Dan shook his head, eyes half-shut again and forehead resting against his palm. Blake nodded, guessing at the massive headache. “I’m really sorry, again. I…” He seemed to draw a deep, shuddering breath, surprising Dan. “...I was really out of line with that comment of mine, where I said you...shared a lot of things with me. I know that’s different and I know we’re not really supposed to talk about that anymore.”

Dan offered him a noncommittal shrug, but he picked up his mug and sipped at the coffee, a clear signal that he was feeling slightly less weight on his shoulders from their conflict and he was listening again.

“Dan? Could you maybe look at me and say something?”

Tiredly, Dan raised his eyes to meet Blake’s. How the hell did he look so fresh and awake after all the shit that had gone down last night? Phil had been like that, too, and he could never fathom it.

Blake’s face suddenly registered shock. “You look like shit. What did you do after I left?”

Frowning, Dan grabbed his spoon and glared at his upside-down reflection. A thick, sickly red rimmed both of his eyes, and he had bags dark enough to rival a vampire’s. His skin didn’t look that good, either.

“What do you think I did?” he sassed back. He hadn’t meant it to come out so harsh, so he quickly tacked on, “When did you come back inside, anyway?”

“Almost right away. I walked like one block around the neighborhood before I realized I had to come back and talk to you. That, and my arms were getting tired from carrying so much luggage,” Blake explained, starting to crack into a little smile. “But you were asleep when I came in, and you wouldn’t open your door when I knocked. I figured it would be better to talk about things in the morning, anyway, when we weren’t high.”

Well, one of them certainly wasn’t all that sober just then, but Dan was not about to reveal that. He shook his head, finally giving in to a smile of his own. “So you thought falling asleep on the floor outside my bedroom was the best way to say good morning. I have a couch, you know.”

“Yeah, well...I wasn’t thinking too straight…”

Dan chuckled and took a bite of the quickly cooling pancakes. “You’re too adorable to stay mad at, I swear to God. I guess I should apologize too...y’know, about being a dick and whatnot. You were just excited about telling me about Seattle, and I had to go and spoil it.”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“You’re not supposed to agree.” Dan flicked a crumb at Blake’s fringe.

“You know, you were being kind of a jealous dick,” Blake continued, undeterred. “I should have just broken down your door and helped myself to your bed.”

Dan wrinkled his nose. “If it makes you feel any better, I never did make it to my bed.” He laughed at Blake’s incredulous look. “Yeah, I don’t remember the details, but apparently I fell asleep on the floor.”

“By the way, you’re not going to lectures today, I’m guessing?”

“Shit.” Dan glanced about for his phone. “What time is it?”

“Quarter to eleven,” Blake signed. “Don’t panic. I figured after last night you wouldn’t be up for a whole day at school. I was just checking, because I was thinking we could go out and run some errands together, maybe eat somewhere before going to your check-up?”

Dan nodded distractedly. “My theory professor is probably going to kill me, but at least I don’t have to see her again until Friday.”

“I’m sorry.” Blake pulled a face.

“It’s fine, Blake. Anyway, you took time off work to come back here. We should be spending time together instead of arguing and...things like going to school.”

Blake couldn’t help but laugh a little at that.

~

The bile was rising in the back of Dan’s throat again by the time they had finished their late lunch and grocery shopping and were back in the car heading through the city toward the doctor’s. He always got like this, jittery and quiet and tight-jawed, hands clenched together in a death grip between his knees, on the ride to his check-ups. Blake understood. He promised he would never let Dan go to any of his check-ups alone, even if it meant flying back to LA at some odd time in his work schedule like today. And no matter how small the matter, even if it was just a tweak of Dan’s hearing aids or some prescription for the migraines, he wanted to be at Dan’s side in case the memories became a bit much for him.

Blake glanced over from where he was at the wheel. With his free hand he signed, _Everything okay?_

Dan nodded quickly. The deja vu was beginning to overpower him; it was almost like that night on the bridge, the night Blake had helped him into the passenger seat of his tiny car, and he had started up the engine and driven for miles and miles in what seemed to be an unending stretch of rainbow street lights in the swirling darkness. Dan had known then that Blake was saying something, asking him how he felt, maybe, but everything was distant and there was that constant ringing in his ears and he just wanted to close his eyes and lay his head back and go to sleep forever.

_The first thing Dan noticed when he woke up - his eyes still closed - was the warmth and softness of something like a bedsheet brushing against his cheek. The air smelled different, too, maybe something like cinnamon, mixed with the faint traces of cologne. He sat up in a rush, panic rising in his chest. He didn’t recognize this bed - wait, why was he even in a bed? He’d never ordered a hotel room - and the place didn’t resemble a hotel at all, for that matter. Gasping a little, he glanced around everywhere at his surroundings, taking in random details like the messy desk and the heap of flannel shirts on the floor and the bright window with the half-broken blinds drawn over it. There was a door - yes, a door, and it didn’t seem to be locked. He stumbled over to it, nearly tripping over the duvet that twisted around his feet in his haste._

_The hallway was completely unfamiliar. Where was he? His vision swam and his stomach turned uneasily. Slapping a hand over his mouth, he bolted down the hallway toward the nearest room where he saw a toilet, and he emptied out whatever sandwich he’d eaten two days before. The ringing returned to his ears._

_Someone was behind him, he knew suddenly. He forced himself up on shaky legs and turned, and as soon as he made eye contact with the blue-eyed, blonde-haired stranger from yesterday, everything from the previous night came flooding back to him. It was him, the man who had stopped him on the bridge and carried him to the car and saved him._

_The blonde man’s face was contorted with worry. He opened his mouth and said something, but nothing seemed to come out. Dan shook his head. “What? I can’t - ” No. What had happened to his voice? Nothing was coming out of his throat either. Dan’s eyes widened._

_“Why can’t I hear you? What’s wrong with me?”_

_He knew he was shouting; he could feel it. His body was trembling all over. He kept babbling things, words he didn’t remember anymore, and no matter how much he talked or how much the blonde man tried to reply he couldn’t make out anything. He crumpled against the sink, but not before the other man lunged for him and steadied him in his arms. And then the next moment he was embracing Dan, holding up his limp frame like he would a child, and he was running his hands through Dan’s matted hair and rubbing his back and whispering silent comfort into his ear._

_Dan pulled away after a few minutes, his eyes moist, and he wanted to apologize for wetting the man’s jumper but the guy was having none of it. The stranger pulled his phone from his pocket, typed something, and then flipped it around to show Dan._

_“My name is Blake. We met on the bridge last night and I brought you to my apartment. Don’t be scared.”_

_Dan read it and nodded. “My name’s Dan,” he said. He was suddenly struck with an incredible insecurity - with the constant ringing in his ears, he couldn’t tell if he was even saying things right. But Blake nodded in understanding. Dan spoke again, softer this time. “Thank you, for that. I’m so sorry to have bothered you. I guess I’ll be on my way. I don’t...I don’t have any money to repay you for the stay, but I promise I’ll - ”_

_Blake was violently shaking his head. He typed out again: “Stay here. Everything is on me. I’m not comfortable letting you go home in this condition. Do you need a doctor?”_

_“I don’t think so,” said Dan tentatively. He tapped at his ears once and then twice, and then started to slap at them when the ringing still wouldn’t go away. “Why can’t I hear anything?”_

_Blake pressed his lips into a thin line, as if unsure if he should be replying. Finally he turned back to his phone and typed something again._

_The note read: “You were going to shoot yourself but when I grabbed the gun from you it went off several times close to your head. That’s probably why you can’t hear anything for now.”_

~

Phil was shaking. He’d never thought he would ever find himself this angry again in his lifetime. The last time had been back in uni, when one of his smart-ass classmates had laid into him so savagely in front of the whole group and the professor had simply listened and done nothing.

He hated it, this feeling. There was sweat blossoming at the roots of his hair and over his upper lip, and his stomach felt as though it were twisting inside him, and he couldn’t seem to form a single coherent sentence. 

Dan had left. _Dan had left him._ No explanation, no apology, not even a casual fake text of “Hello.” After eight years of what they said would be an unbreakable friendship, Dan had just up and left him. For a second the memory flashed through Phil’s mind, the memory of the monotone voice telling him Dan’s number had been disconnected, and the thought stabbed him with an ugly shade of green. He was feeling everything now, everything he’d repressed and dismissed for the past three years, and he was sick of it.

There was only one thing left to do that would ever begin to make him feel all right. He dug into his pocket for his phone and switched on his YouTube app, and he scrolled down to his subscriptions tab. Danisnotonfire was there, as always, at the top. He hit the button “Unsubscribe.”

He went to Twitter, too, and on Dan’s page he also hit “Unfollow,” and on Facebook he clicked “Unfriend.”

There. It was done. Phil felt like an ugly human being for admitting that he felt lighter after that, almost as if he’d purged some monster from inside him, but he couldn’t deny it. This was perhaps the only time he’d done anything remotely unlike the ball of sunshine that the internet knew as Phil Lester, but he was not about to regret it - at least not for a long while.

Unbeknownst to Phil, more than five thousand miles across the ocean, a tall and lean brown-haired man was sitting in a teal green chair in a whitewashed waiting room, flanked by his blue-eyed companion, and he was staring at his phone in his hand, fingers trembling, about to click on that thumbnail named “IT RAINS TOO MUCH IN SEATTLE! And I’m Going to VidCon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ahhh, people have sent me lighthearted death threats in the past on account of my proclivity for cliffhangers (“cliffies,” anyone? Or am I just outdating myself?).  
> Funny story, I actually did get a stress fracture on my shin during my freshman year of college because I kept tripping going up the concrete steps to my dorm. I only wanted an x-ray, but the doctor prescribed me some pain meds, which I tried to refuse, and since I was a smol innocent child who got overwhelmed by most things, I eventually got pressured into paying the $12 co-pay and taking the bottle home. To make it worth it, I tried to take a pill or two, but like Dan I absolutely abhor swallowing pills, plus apparently when I was on the medication my dormmates said I was an insatiable flirt and said lots of dirty things to my then-fwb?? So straight after that those pills went into the garbage can. >.>  
> Buuut back to the story! What do we think of Phil? And that flashback with Blake and Dan? What’s going to happen now?? -M


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Whoops, so maybe I went more than a week without updating. My summer class is done for good now, though, and I got a great grade!! So now hopefully more chapters to come soon? Also, here's an extra long one by way of apology. :)  
> TW: After Blake and Dan get back from the doctor, they argue about depression and suicidal thoughts. Feel free to skip that part.

“Mr. Howell?”

At the sound of the nurse’s call at the doorway, Blake nudged Dan in the ribs, making the latter jump up and shove his phone hastily into his pocket. It was stupid, Dan thought - the fact that he’d even briefly considered watching Phil’s new video here in the waiting room where everyone, including Blake, could see and hear. No, what was even stupider was that he’d caved and checked for updates on Phil’s page to begin with. He hadn’t done that in over two years, and he wondered for a moment if this newfound weakness had anything to do with his hit last night.

They were moving quickly down the narrow hallways of the clinic. Everything smelled cloying all of a sudden. Then Blake’s hand was there, taking his fingers and squeezing them reassuringly, and as the two of them stopped in front of the open doorway at the end of the hall, Dan felt Blake’s other arm wrap around his waist.

“Everything’s going to be okay, Dan,” Blake said, and he signed along with his free hand. “I’m right here. I’m not leaving.” He leaned up and pecked Dan’s lips.

At least it was the same doctor, Dr. Sood, who examined Dan almost every time. She was small and lithe, with smooth coffee skin and luminous eyes that seemed to be able to read everything on one’s mind. For several minutes she went through the motions of checking all the vital parts of Dan’s body before finally examining his ears. Blake watched her with an eagle-like intensity, biting his lip as he did so, until she gave some sort of satisfied sound that everything was as it had been at the last appointment.

“Have you been experiencing any type of discomfort since we last saw you?” asked Dr. Sood, and Blake signed for Dan in translation in case she was speaking too quickly for him. “Any more headaches than usual, or dizziness or eye pain?”

“Headaches, yeah,” Dan said thickly. He slid a sideways glance at Blake before adding: “Almost every day now. Sometimes I don’t get through the whole day with my hearing aids on. And I sometimes take them off earlier in the evenings, before going to bed.”

“Hm. Are the headaches preceded by a ringing sensation?”

Dan nodded in the affirmative.

Dr. Sood nodded back and scribbled some things down on Dan’s chart on her clipboard, humming a bit for a little while, before looking back up with a professional smile. “I’m sorry to hear you’re experiencing this, Mr. Howell. If you’d like, I can write you a prescription for Floricet or Vicodin to help treat the migraines. Now the two pills are a bit different, and I will explain the nuances to you, if you’ll answer a few questions first…”

Blake inevitably zoned out a little bit as she dove into the technical terminology, but he still made sure to sign in translation here and there whenever a look of confusion returned to Dan’s face.

After what frankly seemed like hours, Dr. Sood finally got through her long-winded explanations, and Dan said simply, “I’ll take the Vicodin, then.”

“It says here you have no previous history of illicit drug use or abuse. Is that information still current?”

Dan hesitated only a fraction of a second, but he was so paranoid that Blake would notice. “Yes,” he rushed to reply.

“Perfect. I’ll get that prescription filled for you. Now, have you ever considered a cochlear implant?”

Dan and Blake shared a confused glance at one another. “I don’t think you mentioned that, no,” said Blake.

“It’s a surgical procedure that essentially replaces certain damaged parts of your auditory system,” Dr. Sood explained. “Of course, like all other surgeries, there are potential risks, but it’s a fairly safe procedure that’s been highly developed over the decades. If you want, I’ll have Marilyn give you brochure with all the details for you to take home. If you have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll also give you the card of the specialist we usually recommend for cochlear implants.”

“Wait!” said Dan suddenly, as the woman was about to exit the room. “How much does that cost? And...would it really work? I mean - ” He cast a desperate look askance at Blake. “Would I be able to hear the way I used to?”

Dr. Sood seemed to choose her words cautiously. “We’d have to run several tests, of course, to determine the levels of risk and success factors. It varies from person to person. In some cases the patient’s hearing has returned to normal, and in other cases not quite.” She took her leave with a nod then and disappeared out the door and down the carpeted hallway to retrieve the prescription.

“Dan,” Blake began immediately, a sober tone coloring his voice.

“It’s probably thousands of dollars. And it might not work. What if - what if I turn out even more fucked up than before the surgery?”

“They are called surgeons for a reason.”

“But you heard her, Blake. It doesn’t work on everybody.”

“I’m sure she’s just being conservative,” said Blake. “Look, you don’t have to worry about the cost. I said I’d always be there to help you, didn’t I?”

Dan looked away, at his knees, at the floor, anywhere but his boyfriend’s eyes. He tucked his trembling hands under his thighs where he sat on the examination table. “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“You don’t have to ask. I’m already promising you I’ll help.”

“No.” Dan could no longer control the choked emotion in his voice. “Look, it’s my own bloody fault I went deaf in the first place, so why should you have to pay for it? You’re already doing so much - so, _so_ much - for me…”

“Stop thinking of yourself as a burden. I’m doing this because _I love you_ , Dan.”

Sudden moisture was stinging Dan’s eyes and he hated it. He forced himself to raise his gaze back to Blake’s so he wouldn’t be tempted to cry. “I love you too, but - ”

“No buts, dork.” Blake stood up and wedged himself between Dan’s knees so that their faces were level with each other. “At least just think about it, okay? Don’t cry, Dan! It’s going to be all right - ”

“Are you sure you’re not just pushing this because you can’t stand me being deaf?”

Blake should have looked appalled at Dan’s candid outburst, but by now he was accustomed to his boyfriend’s occasional bouts of crippling insecurity. “I promise it’s not that. It’s not about me. I only want what’s best for you.”

“I guess I’ll think about it, then.”

“Please do.” Blake’s mouth finally quirked up in a smile, and he tilted Dan’s chin upward with a finger and pressed his lips gently to Dan’s. Dan inhaled sharply, his eyelids fluttering closed. It always took him by surprise when they kissed, even when he initiated it - it was never planned, always at the heat of the moment, not very often but always making him tingle underneath his skin all over when they did. And within a second he began to melt into Blake’s lips and the feel and the smell of them: safe, warm, breathless yet secure. Always something tasting new behind the cool tongue.

Dr. Sood coughed softly somewhere from behind them, and it was only Blake who heard her and pulled away with a sheepish smile and a scratch at the back of his neck. Dan’s entire face flooded with crimson, a look that Blake endlessly teased him about the entire ride home.

~

“You want the last slice?”

“Huh?” Dan peeled his gaze away from the TV screen and up to Blake’s. He was sprawled across Blake’s lap in a position that should have been uncomfortable by the looks of it but surprisingly wasn’t.

 _The pizza_ , Blake signed. _You want it?_

Dan shrugged, or at least shrugged as much as was humanly possible in his position. “You can have it, I don’t care,” he said, signing back.

Dan felt the rise and fall of Blake’s chest behind his head as the latter heaved a sigh. “Okay, that’s it. What’s gotten into you tonight? I thought this was your favorite movie.”

“No, it is.” Dan gulped. To be honest, he couldn’t recount any of the scene that had just flashed across the screen. 

“Is it your professor you’re worried about? Just show me the homework and I’ll see if I can help you.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then what?”

Again, Dan shrugged, probably not helping his case. With an effort he managed to tug himself upright again and leaned back into the sofa crease next to Blake’s shoulder, and he drew a hand over his face for a long moment. He let his eyes drift closed until Blake nudged him with an elbow.

“Is this about the cochlear implant? Seriously, Dan, I just said to think about it. Not worry all night over it,” Blake attempted to joke, but it was clear from the flickering glint in his eyes that he was more upset than he was letting on. “We have loads of time. Please, I just want you to relax and for us to have a good time before I fly back to Seattle.”

“You’re right,” Dan muttered back gloomily, but still his tone did not brighten. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not asking you to apologize. Just...talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. Honestly.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

 _Yes_ , Dan cried out inside, _yes! I want you to believe that and just leave me alone! How could you even begin to understand if I tried to talk about it?_

Instead, what Dan said was: “I...can’t. Talk about it, that is.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know how to put it into words!” Dan erupted. He carded his fingers through his unruly curls. “Look, I feel like shit sometimes, okay? It has nothing to do with you. You were really awesome today and you helped me during my check-up and everything and you’re even staying over to watch a movie with me...I just don’t know what’s gotten into me. Let’s just forget it, all right? And finish the bloody movie. I’m sorry. I’ll take the damn pizza, if that’s what you want.”

“See, how can I believe it’s nothing if you’re exploding at me like this?” said Blake. “This isn’t about the pizza. I could care less about the fucking pizza. I just don’t understand!”

 _Of course you wouldn’t_ , Dan thought tiredly. He just wanted to go to sleep now.

“I want you to be happy,” Blake continued. His voice was starting to break, and Dan almost felt guilt tug at his chest. “I try so, so hard. I help you pay for your degree because I want you to get back on track and become whatever you want to be. I went to sign language classes together with you because I didn’t want you to be alone. I wanted to make sure you knew I accepted you the way you are. I don’t even care if you get the cochlear implant or not, I love you either way. Okay? Why can’t you understand that?”

“Because it’s not even about the fucking cochlear implant!” Dan was on his feet now, pacing, not daring to look back at Blake too long lest he fully implode.

“I thought we went over this! I told you to talk to somebody about this if it got any worse. You _promised_ me everything was better. I’m doing my best, Dan, I really am! The least you could do is open up a little to me!”

“I don’t owe you that,” Dan snapped back, but the instant that the words flew out of his mouth, he regretted them. He set his jaw fiercely. He wouldn’t apologize for that now. He couldn’t.

“What?”

“I said, I don’t owe you that. I know you’ve been doing everything you can for me. I see that. Believe me, I remember every day and it makes me so fucking guilty - ”

“This is not about me trying to make you feel guilty! Don’t you dare make me out to be the bad guy, Dan.”

“Not trying to make me feel guilty? Then what are you doing now? You can’t just guilt people out of - out of - ” _Out of depression_ , he almost said, but the syllables were too acrid on Dan’s tongue and he bit them back before they came tripping out.

“I’m sorry you feel like shit, Dan, I really am. But I don’t even know where it’s coming from - you wouldn’t even tell me why you wanted to jump off that damn bridge, and I still tried to understand - ”

“I told you not to talk about that night!” Dan was shaking all over. He hated himself for shaking, for shouting, for starting to cry. He raised his arms over his face and looked toward the ceiling, as if he could magically draw strength from the sheetrock and concrete. No. His times of weakness were over. He couldn’t break down in front of Blake, not now.

“So tell me the truth for once, if you don’t want me to keep bringing up that night!” Blake yelled. “I know there’s something you’re not telling me. I’m not stupid. People aren’t just sad and suicidal for no reason.”

“The fuck they are!” Dan heard himself roaring. This wasn’t him. But with every word that came out of Blake’s mouth, his own blood started to boil inside his head, and he couldn’t stop himself anymore. “What the fuck would you know about that? This isn’t you trying to understand, Blake. No. You’re trying to make me happy your way. Not everybody can talk about their feelings. Haven’t you thought about the possibility that maybe I don’t talk about it because talking about it makes me feel worse?”

“But you’re lying to me whenever you pretend to be happy!”

“Christ - Blake - ” Dan couldn’t catch his breath. “I _am_ happy when I’m with you, most of the time. I’m not lying.”

“So what am I doing wrong?”

“Can you just - stop it for one second!”

“Stop what?”

“Stop making this about you. Stop making me feel guilty. Because if that’s your goal, you’re sure as hell succeeding.” Dan pressed the heels of his palms to his temples. His head was throbbing and felt about ready to burst.

“I am _not_ trying to make you feel guilty. You’re the one who needs to own up to your problems and confront your feelings and just stop being a fucking coward - ”

“Oh. So I’m a coward, am I?” Dan’s voice dropped to a menacing murmur. The noise inside his head had ceased abruptly, and now there was nothing but deathly quiet. He was still simmering, yes, but it was as though the smoke had cleared from his vision and everything was crystal to him now.

Blake swallowed, but it was apparent he was not about to back down. He stood up, snatching the blanket from the sofa and folding it in jerky, angry movements. “Yes. People who run away from life instead of facing their shit like normal people - ”

“Shut. The fuck. _Up_.” Dan tore the hearing aids from his ears and hurled them full force at Blake’s head. They missed and clattered pathetically against the wall, but it was enough to jolt some sensible fear into Blake’s eyes. He had stopped messing with the blanket.

Blake stepped forward, one hand out as if to appease a rabid animal. “Dan, I’m sorry - ”

But Dan didn’t hear him. He could read Blake’s lips, all right, but he would not hear him. This conversation was over. “Just leave. I’m tired.”

“But - ”

“Can you leave me alone for once?”

With that quivering in the air between them, Dan pivoted on his heel and speed walked to the bathroom, letting the door bang shut behind him. Only when he caught sight of himself in the mirror did he realize just how much he had been shaking. It felt as though the muscles were slowly detaching from his skin, and the nerves in his fingertips were trembling so much that he couldn’t even tell anymore if he felt hot or cold or if he simply felt nothing at all. Splotches of red and white were splashed across his face and his eyes were wet, rimmed with a mocking pink. He tried to fling some water over himself, but nothing could stop the quaking. 

Somehow Dan finally managed to get the medicine cabinet open and find the new bottle of Vicodin Dr. Sood had given him that afternoon. He knew what the recommended dosage was, but he didn’t care. He poured out three pills onto his palm - one even nearly fell down the drain because his fingers yet refused to be steady - closed his eyes, and threw his head back.

~

Phil stood rooted to the floor in the doorway of the London flat for a solid ten minutes before it even occurred to him to move. He couldn’t believe it - he’d actually flown from Seattle back to London in the middle of the night, haggard and haphazard as he was, and now that he was back in what he used to call home, he couldn’t even bring himself to step any closer to the staircase.

The strident ring of his cell phone jolted him back to consciousness. “Christina?” he greeted his assistant director on the other end of the line.

“Hi, Phil. I just got your message. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, of course. Just an emergency that I had to fly back home for, but it’s nothing life-threatening.” Phil tried his signature chuckle, but even that sounded false to him and he stopped. “You’ll be okay on set for the next two days, right? Look, I’m really, terribly sorry about the short notice - ”

Christina’s sigh and short laugh cut him short. “It’s fine, Phil. Just take care of yourself, ’kay? Let me know if you need anything. We’ll probably shoot the majority of the segue scenes until you get back. Don’t rush, I know what emergencies can be like.”

“I won’t.” This time Phil gave a genuine smile, though he knew Christina couldn’t see him. “Thank you so much, Christina. I mean it. I owe you a million.”

“Yeah, just get me my morning coffee every day from now on, how’s that sound?”

Phil allowed himself a small laugh before bidding goodbye. He straightened, set down his bags by the doorway, and laid his phone on the counter. He was exhausted - almost as worn out as he had been flying from England to Australia before - but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink until he at least started the task he had come back here for in the first place. It was time to get to business.

Three hours later, the first defiant and discordant hues of the morning sun were beginning to peek through the blinds of Dan’s room, and Phil was still hard at work chucking things from the wardrobe into one of now several giant black garbage bags that littered the floor. Everything went in without discrimination: clothes, plushies, lamps, sticky notes, knickknacks, decorations. Everything. 

Phil knew that at some point he had ceased crying, but a single rogue tear rolled down his nose and plopped onto the sweatshirt he was now clutching in his hands. It was dusty and filthy - just like most everything else in the room - but still recognizable. It was the dark gray button-up hoodie Dan was so fond of, the one with the ridiculously high collar and the useless pointed ears. Phil himself had so many treasured memories associated with the sweatshirt, though he was loathe to admit it. Whenever Dan wore it, he’d wanted nothing else than to fold the younger boy into his embrace and keep his foul-mouthed, sarcastic soul of innocence away from the world. And the way that Dan’s neatly straightened hair came out looking like a bird’s nest whenever the hood fell back - no. Phil choked down the remembrance and shoved the hoodie a little more forcefully than necessary into the nearby trash bag. He could not cling to anything, or sooner than later he would find himself amid a pile of worthless mementos, weeping over somebody who more than likely hadn’t even spared him another thought since three years ago.

Phil sat back on his haunches and closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them again, he was leaning awkwardly against one of the garbage bags, his neck bent at a painful angle, and the sun was streaming over him in a hot vengeance. He stumbled with a yawn to the window to shut the blinds completely.

The clock on the opposite wall - the only vestige of decoration that had obstinately remained alive and which for that same reason Phil hadn’t been able to throw away just yet - told him it was half past ten in the morning. He’d been dozing for nearly five hours.

Drawing a hand over his face, Phil unlocked his phone to call the first skip company he could Google. His mind changed plans, though, as soon as he pulled up the phone app and saw “DAN” still listed under his favorite contacts. Without thinking anymore, he scrolled through the H’s in his phone and hit the number for Dan’s mother. She was still lovingly listed as “Mama Howell.”

Phil didn’t know what to expect or why he was so astonished that she picked up at the third ring. “Hi, Phil?” she chirped.

“Oh - um - hello! Sorry to bother you at a time like this - ”

“You’re not a bother at all!” She chuckled deeply, a warm motherly chuckle. “I haven’t heard from you in ages and frankly, I was just about to check on you one of these days.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that, Mrs. Howell.”

“You always say that, Phil. Now what’s up?”

“Er…” He wracked his brain for a second, and then blurted out: “Do you know a good skip company?”

“A good skip company?”

“Um, yeah. You know, decent rates, trustworthy, will come to the door right away - that sort of thing - I don’t have much experience with this sort of stuff - ” Phil knew he was already babbling at this point, but Mrs. Howell took everything in stride. She wasn’t one to call him out on his bluff even if she suspected he may be calling about a particular son of hers.

“Of course, dear. But what on earth are you throwing out?”

“Erm, just some really old furniture, clothes I don’t need anymore, things like that…”

“Oh.” Mrs. Howell exhaled loudly into the speaker and the silence that ensued seemed to stretch for hours. She knew. Oh God, she knew.

But she didn’t say anything about it. No, she was too good a soul to do that. After another moment, she said cheerily, “Try calling Hutchinson’s then, why don’t you?”

“Hutchinson’s? Right…” Phil grabbed a pen and started writing down the number on his arm as she dictated it to him.

“Is there anything else at all you need, dear?” said Mrs. Howell, once the information had already been repeated a few times. “How are you doing? I heard about the movie you’re making - congratulations - ”

“It’s going great, thanks. Um.” He sucked in a humongous breath. It was now or never; and she seemed like she was about to hang up in a minute. “How are you and the family doing? And how’s Dan?”

 _How’s Dan_. The words were so foreign to him. Almost never in his life had he had to ask that of another person. It almost made him wince.

“Dan’s fine,” replied Mrs. Howell, barely missing a beat. “Granted, I don’t hear from him often, but he texted me sometime at the beginning of the month. _Still alive, he said_. The sarcastic little thing.” She let out a slightly crazed little laugh.

“Oh. Okay.” Phil felt like his entire face and neck were on fire. So Dan was alive and well and he still had the decency to tell his family - but not his best friend. He kicked at the nearest garbage bag with a vengeance.

~

Dan was on the floor again. He thought he had opened his eyes to the same nightmare he had been trying to escape in his sleep, but the thick fingers of smoke and the merciless sting in his eyes could not be imagined. He doubled over with a cough and tried to suck in a breath, but the acrid taste of the air only punched his lungs with another bout of coughs and gasps.

A hand was roughly shaking him on the shoulder all of a sudden. He turned his bleary gaze upward and could barely discern the masculine silhouette against the vermillion haze, tugging him upward to his feet.

“Phil?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ahaha, don't kill me! I know the ending is a little confusing, but I promise everything will be clarified in the next chapter!   
> For those who skipped the scene with Blake and Dan arguing: the two fought about Dan's unwillingness to open up about his depression. Dan feels like Blake is trying to guilt him and told Blake to leave. Shortly after that, he took a bunch of Vicodin pills.  
> Stay tuned for more! -M


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Some details of Dan taking drugs toward the end of the chapter, after the last "~" sign.

The figure was gesturing frantically, shaking its head, before it finally reached forward and yanked Dan bodily from the floor by the armpits. Dan stumbled forward - he’d barely even found his footing - and would have hurtled headlong into the smoke if the steady arms around his shoulders and chest hadn’t squeezed him and caught him in time.

Everything was disoriented. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could feel the deadly hum of the crackle through the floor. He blinked once, twice, three times, and finally he was able to hold his eyes open a little wider. Blake. It was Blake’s plaid-clad arms around him. They were heading toward something like a ledge - no, stairs - he was tripping again, coughing, or maybe even sobbing, he wasn’t quite too sure what to make of the heaving between his shoulder blades.

All of a sudden they burst out into fresh air and they were surrounded by flashing lights and shouting, livid-faced men in neon reflective jackets. Dan winced and pressed closer into Blake’s flannel shirt.

“Is that your apartment up there that’s smoking?” one of the firemen addressed them bluntly.

Blake slide a glance askance at Dan and, noticing the latter’s lack of response, spoke for both of them. “Yes. My boyfriend can’t hear and I just got here literally two minutes ago, so I’ll have to ask him what happened. Sorry.”

“It seems containable,” the fireman assured him. “Just, if we know the cause of the fire, we’ll definitely be able to cover all bases.”

Blake nudged Dan, but when he failed to elicit a lucid response, he pointed to the nearest fire truck. “Do you mind if we sit in there, sir? I think he’s kind of in shock.”

In truth, Dan was not so much in shock as he was petrified. Everything was beginning to clear in his memory now, and he was almost one hundred percent sure what - and who - had caused the fire. Namely, himself.

“Dan. Dan? Look at me?” Blake had settled Dan sideways onto the passenger seat at the open door of the truck and had his palms lightly cupping his boyfriend’s cheeks. He raised his right hand and signed: _Hey. Dan. Are you okay? Talk to me._

At last Dan rewarded him with a slight hint of acknowledgment, pointing at his ears. After a moment’s hesitation, he signed back: _No hearing aids._

 _I know_ , said Blake. _Are you okay?_

_Yeah, I guess._

“Oh, Dan, I could have lost you. I almost didn’t come back. I could have really lost you,” Blake breathed, and he tugged Dan forward in a crushing hug. It took Dan a moment to register the embrace, but when he did, he slowly wrapped his arms around Blake’s waist and allowed himself to be overwhelmed by the warmth of his smell. He buried his face in Blake’s shoulder and simply breathed. Then a cough escaped him.

Blake pulled away again, concern etched in all the lines on his face. _Are you sure you’re okay?_

Dan nodded resolutely.

_What happened? Please try to tell me. I know you’re disoriented, but it’s important._

The only part that Dan could remember was the part where he sat down on the floor, laptop in hand, with his web browser open to AmazingPhil’s YouTube channel and he tapped on the newest video in the corner. His mind had been somewhat fuzzy around the edges, but his skin was tingling a little, almost pleasantly, and he’d found himself almost smiling as he watched the achingly familiar face, framed in black locks, appear on the screen. He had downed three or four pills an hour before and was still feeling that buoyant high.

“But anyway, sorry about the rambling. I’m posting this video mainly to make a big announcement: I’m going to be at VidCon again this year! Yayyy!” Though Dan still didn’t have his hearing aids on and he hadn’t had the patience to look for them after throwing them at Blake’s head, he could still almost hear the words in Phil’s exact voice and accent. Phil was bouncing up and down where he sat on what was apparently a crisply made hotel bed. The scenery, lit modestly by sconces on the wall, sent a pang of nostalgia through Dan as the memory of their international tour washed over him.

He didn’t remember much else of the rest of the video. All he did remember was being slumped there on the floor in a daze, churning over and over in his mind the words _I’m going to be at VidCon again this year_. And he had no idea why, but for more than the standard three seconds that he usually entertained such a wildly harebrained plan, he began to imagine himself - Phil - no, himself and Phil - at VidCon somehow, even though he knew it would never happen again.

And it was that last thought that inevitably sent the guilt crashing down on him again, and he’d frowned as he stared into space, feeling the edge of his high already wearing off. He’d wandered back into the bathroom for more of the pills and somehow found himself back on the carpet with a scrap of tin foil and the lighter he’d bought in Japan - one of the only souvenirs of his life with Phil that he’d brought to America - and then the next moment he was smiling, fuzzy and floating inside again, perhaps not truly smiling but feeling as if there were some vague reason to be happy.

He must have fallen asleep or passed out, because the next thing he remembered was a horridly vivid nightmare in which his legs were being consumed by flames as he lay frozen, and Phil had come crashing through the door with a sledge hammer and shouting his name. Then he’d woken and it had turned out to be Blake.

Dan leaned back now against the side of the doorframe of the fire truck for support and inhaled deeply through his nose. When he opened his eyes again, Blake was still staring expectantly at him.

Blake’s gaze dipped to the rims of Dan’s eyes. He gave a nearly inaudible gasp. “Oh my God.” He signed: _Are you actually high right now?_

It took an effort, but Dan managed to shake his head. _Just lightly buzzed._

_You look fucking stoned to me._

_I guess I didn’t put out the lighter_ , Dan signed impatiently. _I’m sorry. I should have been more careful._

Blake’s eyes narrowed for a second, almost as if he didn’t believe Dan. He knew the fix he’d gotten them hadn’t lasted more than one night; but then again, he was not always around his boyfriend these days. Dan himself shoved his trembling hands underneath his thighs and forced himself to look away, at the steady patter of droplets from the sudden drizzle on the windshield, and he convinced himself that Blake wouldn’t think he was taking anything more than pot.

Just then one of the chubbier firemen jogged up to them, panting but smiling a bit. He pointed over his shoulder with a thumb. “Everything’s been put out. Thankfully, it was a smaller fire than it looked. Seems like it was a laptop charger left unattended on a bed.”

Blake nodded and looked over meaningfully to Dan. His eyes still on his boyfriend, he said to the fireman, “Thanks for everything, really. And thanks for letting us know. We’ll be more careful with those things in the future.”

“Yeah, electronics and fabric don’t really mix. I would judge it’s actually pretty safe to go back inside if you’d like; otherwise, if you’re uncomfortable with the smell of the smoke, you could always get a room somewhere else for the night and everything should be better by the morning.”

 _I’m really sorry_ , Dan signed again to Blake.

Blake sighed and dropped his head into his palm. “Honestly, this wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been a dick,” he started out slowly.

_Blake, I was the one smoking the damn thing. He probably just said it was a laptop charger because he was being nice about it._

But Blake was already shaking his head. _Whether it was the lighter or the charger, if I hadn’t left, it wouldn’t have happened, period. You’d have had your hearing aids on and heard the fire alarm, at the very least. I thought about everything you said tonight and I was a dick. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’m sorry._ He grabbed Dan to himself again in another bone-crushing hug. “I could have seriously lost you, you dork. Don’t do that again.”

“I won’t,” Dan said aloud, his chuckle thick and distant. 

“Listen.” Blake pulled away and held Dan firmly by the shoulders, making unwavering eye contact with him. _I need to make this up to you. First, let’s get some of your things and you’re sleeping at my place tonight. We can’t afford to be apart or have any more fights before I leave for Seattle again, okay? And we can go out somewhere, restart, clear our minds. It can be tomorrow or after I come back from the filming._

“No - ” Dan started to protest, but Blake cut him off.

_I mean it, Dan. Anything you like. Just think about it, okay?_

After a moment, Dan rewarded Blake with a reluctant, thin-lipped smile and tiny nod. “I’ll try.” He then glanced up ruefully toward the now sooty window of his apartment. “You don’t suppose I’d still be able to find my hearing aids amid everything, do you? I couldn’t find them even after you left.”

“We’ll try. Come on, let’s go up and see what we can get. We’re not leaving until we find those hearing aids.”

~

Dan was well acquainted with Blake’s apartment - it was, after all, the first thing he’d opened his eyes to after that night on the bridge - but because he hadn’t been coming over too frequently in recent weeks, he was astounded that there was what appeared to be a new bed set (complete with mattress and box spring and all) and several wall hangings, still wrapped in cardboard and plastic, arranged on the floor in the living room.

“Since when did you start renovating this place?” he blurted out.

Blake flushed hotly and flipped his blonde fringe, a sure sign that he was hiding something mischievous. _Oh, I just wanted it to look spiffy the next time you came around. I didn’t exactly, you know, expect it to be this soon._

“Well, the bed looks fantastic.” It was true; even the checkered duvet was new. It was red and black, of course, Blake’s two favorite colors, but Dan could almost envision it being apple green and cerulean, like Phil’s quintessential set that always appeared in the background of his videos.

“Thanks,” said Blake shyly. “I was thinking, uh, let’s skip the bull about ‘I’ll take the couch and you take the bed’ and let’s just share the bed tonight, yeah?”

Dan smirked. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Blake rolled his eyes. “God, I like you better stoned than sober. You never flirt with me like this on normal days.”

“But I am sober,” said the other with a frown.

“The fuck you are. Here, catch.” Blake tossed one of his own comfy cotton pajama sets at Dan, seeing as the only piece of furniture actually damaged back at the other apartment had been Dan’s nightstand where he kept his underwear and sleeping things.

Dan got undressed right there, despite Blake’s blushing protests, because truth be told, he still was high as hell and he felt everything from sexy to brash to invincible. It wasn’t like they had never shared a bed before, but he felt a slight thrill rush through him at the prospect of cuddling under the covers again like a completely normal night after the last few days of their exhausting altercations.

“So,” spoke Blake again, when they were comfortably splayed on the mattress and staring up the ceiling fan. _Have you thought about where we should go or what to do?_

Dan groaned. _Really? We almost just got burned to crisp and you’re in the mood to discuss date options?_

_I’m serious. Stop grinning!_

“Okay, okay. Let me think for a minute.” Dan bit his lip and rolled over on his side, head resting on his right hand, and studied Blake. He didn’t know why he did it, but out of the blue, before he could stop himself, he found himself blurting out: “Let’s go to VidCon.”

“Go to vid-what?”

“VidCon. Video Convention. It’s for YouTubers and video bloggers to meet up and they always do it right here in California every year.”

“Okayyy…” Blake’s lips were pursed; he obviously had no idea where this was going or how this was remotely fun.

“Ugh, you and your complete disinterest in the internet,” Dan teased him. “Seriously though, you could get to meet Hannah Hart.”

At that, Blake couldn’t suppress a gasp. “You mean the queen of all things kitchen-y?”

_You’re such a nerd. Of course Queen Hannah Hart. She’s really nice. I met her once._

Now Blake’s eyes were the size of saucers. _No way! You did?_ “Don’t lie to me,” he added aloud with a grin. “How on earth did you manage that?”

Dan rolled his eyes. He was definitely not about to spill to his boyfriend now about just how famous he had been as meme prince, but he also had no intentions of twisting the truth - just cutting out bits of it. “At VidCon, of course. Which is why you should go.”

“When is it, then? How much are the tickets? It’ll probably eat up my whole savings but I don’t care - ”

 _Chill!_ Dan signed with a cackle. _Only a little over a hundred. I promise we’ll get to meet Hannah._

“Wait.” Blake switched to signing. _I thought this was supposed to be a way for me to make up being a dick to you. Sounds like I’m the only one who will be benefiting from this._

Dan shrugged, unwilling to acknowledge even to himself how the beat of his heart had quickened at the flashing thought of a man with black hair and wide eyes like the spring ocean, a man who always held his VidCon microphone awkwardly between four fingers and grinned with his tongue between his teeth and insisted on wearing the most pastel counterparts to Dan’s own outfits. No. He was most definitely not thinking of Phil Lester. It was - betrayal, almost; no, perhaps that was too strong a word. It was more of a fruitless return to a dream that would never come true, the too-happy ending to a nightmare that he himself had started in his life. It was...blasphemy.

Still, Dan cast a quick smile to the side at Blake, who was splayed on the mattress and mirroring his position with one hand behind his head as he signed with the other.

“I love all the YouTubers and bloggers,” he said simply. “It’ll be a treat to see you happy.”

And he really, truly meant it. Or at least he believed he wanted to mean it.

~

An entire lifetime can change over the course of a month. That much Phil had already known since he first met Dan online eleven years ago, and since the two of them had hit it off like magic through Twitter and Skype in a matter of weeks. Phil had also known this fact of life since the day they knew they were no longer doing the BBC radio show, but deep down inside in the very depths of his heart he’d sensed that something far greater and unimaginable was looming in their joint future.

This truth, too, Phil was beginning to be acquainted with once again on the morning a curly-haired, green-eyed man his height, in an ordinary heather maroon hoodie and Vans and with a pair of muscular arms laden with two cardboard boxes, rang his doorbell.

“PJ!” Phil exclaimed, jumping back from the door with an apologetic expression to clear the way for him. “Sorry, I was in the middle of brushing my teeth, I thought you weren’t going to be here until a half hour from now, otherwise I would have been downstairs already and helping you - ”

“Don’t sweat it,” PJ laughed. “Can I just set this down over there?”

“Oh, yeah, anywhere near a wall and not too close to doorways, just so I don’t go tripping over them blindly,” Phil joked, pointing to his glasses. “Have you got a lot more left?”

“Only ten or twelve more. I’m a man of few needs, Philip Lester.”

Phil groaned at the almost ironically parental use of his full name, but he still conceded a mutual chuckle with his friend before following him back down the stairs toward the lobby where the rest of PJ’s belongings were stacked about.

God, PJ was fit. Phil had usually been the more sprightly one between him and Dan when it came to stairs and carrying things, but PJ looked as if he weren’t sweating a drop. And his boxes were so...neat. Labeled, taped, exactly the same size as each other. It was a pleasant sight, of course, but compared to everything else Phil had known to come with a roommate for over seven years, it was nothing less that disconcerting.

“I’ve got - some breakfast - sort of made for when we get to the top,” Phil gasped out, glasses fogging up a bit from the huff of his breath on the lenses when they’d gotten dislodged down his nose.

The grin in PJ’s voice was obvious. “Slow down, Phil,” he called down from one flight up. “You didn’t even have to carry so much. And thanks, I already ate before I came over, but I could probably use another bite.”

“You already ate? Don’t tell me you even showered _and_ flossed this morning, too.”

“What? I can’t just show up here in my pyjamas and bed hair.” PJ set down the last of the boxes - finally - with a grand sound of triumph by the couch in the living room, before padding over the carpet quickly to take the miscellaneous paraphernalia from Phil’s own arms and place them on the coffee table.

“What time _do_ you even wake up every day, anyway?”

“Usually nine, sometimes seven if I have somewhere important to go.” PJ shrugged then and admitted, “I know, not much of an early riser - ”

“Excuse me?” Phil scoffed. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve barged into Dan’s room at two in the afternoon and he’s _still_ \- oh.” The breath all left him then in a sudden rush, and he and PJ shared a loaded look in that moment, blue eyes locking with green, as their minds both raced to the next question that was trembling inevitably between them.

“How’s Dan these days?” PJ finally asked, just at the same second that Phil blurted out, “Fine! He’s fine. Doing great!”

“Oh, okay. That’s...good.”

“Yup.” They were both suddenly tongue-tied. Cereal, Phil remembered randomly. That was always the perfect ice breaker. “Milk with your Shreddies or no?”

Five minutes into their cereal fest, however, it was clear that Daniel James Howell still refused to exit either of their minds. “Has Dan - has he left any of his things, by any chance?” PJ ventured again, wincing visibly as if he knew how painful the ground upon which he was treading actually was. “I mean, camera equipment, props, that sort of...oh gosh, I didn’t mean to sound, I don’t know, like a free-loader. I was just curious, because I haven’t gotten all my stuff transferred, and obviously I wouldn’t want to because I work with tons of costumes and makeup and whatnot for my videos and I - you know - just - ”

“It’s fine,” Phil interrupted him softly. “I...um, ninety percent of his stuff is gone, but yeah, there’s still some basic cameras in there. I just took the memory cards, so you’ll have to use your own.”

“Of course, of course.”

 _Please don’t say anything else, please don’t_ , Phil suddenly found himself praying to whatever powers there might be above.

“I’m sorry,” PJ spoke again at last, so low and inarticulate that Phil almost thought he’d imagined it; but PJ’s face seemed to evince a quiet pain similar to that found in Phil’s own eyes, and Phil realized the other man had not meant to hurt him with the poor choice of topic. After all, the most creative minds tended to share their certain strains of awkwardness.

“It’s okay,” Phil reassured him again. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

“I just - ”

“Thank you, Peej,” Phil blurted out. He couldn’t sit around and wait to hear what else had been on the tip of PJ’s tongue.

“What? For what?”

“For being my roommate, I guess.” And Phil rushed to tack on: “The rent, you know. Bloody ridiculous in London. I don’t know how much further I could have held out with the flat if you hadn’t agreed to share.”

PJ looked at him, and for a second his irises melted into a buttery hazel, soft and compassionate, _knowing_. He knew it was a lie. Phil had no need of extra money; heck, he knew Phil must have misrepresented the real monthly rate of the flat and made PJ only pay about twenty percent. He knew, but he wasn’t Dan Howell: he would not call out his new roommate on the falsehood and ask for answers.

“No problem,” PJ said instead. And deep down inside, he churned over and over again what Phil had said offhand, that nearly all of Dan’s stuff was gone. He tried not imagine what it must have been like for Phil to stand in the doorway of an empty bedroom full of memories and stuffed mementos, garbage bag in one hand and a fistful of resolve in the other. He tried not to picture how Phil must have had to close his eyes and draw a deep, shuddering breath, how he must have had to blink back unshed tears, before starting the daunting task of touching the things that meant so much to him and throw them away as if they were a stranger’s.

~

A lot can change over the course of a month. This Dan knew, though it was one of those things he fought against within himself constantly.

Over the course of a month, he’d suddenly come to know a black-haired, blue-eyed boy through a screen of pixels, a boy who laughed at the same things he did and who believed his spirit animal was a lion, a boy who had materialized into flesh and blood before his eyes on the train platform in Manchester under the vermilion shadows of a reluctant and raging sunset one night in 2009.

Over the course of a month, since he moved in with the best friend of his dreams and started waking up each day to the reminder of the lectures he so dreaded, but would be comforted by a mug of hot chocolate waiting for him on the breakfast bar, he began to realize he was meant for more than studying law. He began to realize he had no inkling at all what he would do with his future, but he also began to realize, little by little, that that was okay - and that he had his blue-eyed savior at his side no matter what. And he began to realize, maybe a little slowly and angrily, maybe even fearfully, that he was nowhere near straight.

And over the course of a month in the year 2020, Dan Howell found himself in the rearmost stall of the men’s bathrooms at VidCon, the halogen lights streaming sickly over his skin as he reached into his pocket with shaking fingers and drew out the carefully folded square of tin foil with the white pills inside. He found himself digging for his lighter and crushing the butt of it against the pills, over and over, until the powder was loose enough to resemble rough grains of sand. And he found himself igniting the lighter and drawing the flame across the bottom of the foil until the powder melted into a shimmering liquid that almost reminded him of white mercury.

Someone in another stall was singing. It was not quite off-key; it was decent, and there was a baritone ring to it that sounded almost operatic, but the personality behind it struck a chord of familiarity within Dan that made him freeze.

_Wasting our last chance_  
_To come away_  
_Just break the silence_  
_‘Cause I’m drifting away from you_  
_Away from you…_

It couldn’t be.

Dan pocketed the foil, the lighter and the needle, and from somewhere he drew the courage to actually crack open the door of his stall - ever so quietly - and let it swing out wide enough without squeaking so he could peep through the crack. The singing man wasn’t in a stall; he was bent over the sink directly parallel to Dan’s gaze, earbuds in and still humming, running the cool water over his pale and lithe hands. His t-shirt was violet.

No, it definitely couldn’t be.

Dan closed his eyes and struggled to breathe. There was no way the high was hitting him this fast.

Had he seen Dan? He could flick his eyes up at the mirror at any moment now and catch sight of the spy staring through the crack in the doorway of the stall.

It was then that Dan had to bite back a bitter, ironic laugh. It had only taken a month. Just one month, the month of June, from the time when Blake had agreed to buy them VidCon tickets, to the time Dan found himself rooted to the tiles in a silver-washed bathroom, hyped up on opioids and standing less than fifty feet away from a very real Phil Lester singing the very song Dan had listened to after nearly kissing him by the carousel.

“You can’t be real,” Dan whispered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I skipped out on my graduate student orientation to escape to the library and finish this chapter. GAH. I'm so sorry for the drama...sort of. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Turns out the VidCon chapter is coming up sooner than expected!!!  
> As always, thanks so so so much for all the lovely and thoughtful comments on the last update, and apologies for the late upload! Don't forget to let me know what you think! ~M


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Okay, before we say anything else, can I just say THAT LAST DANANDPHILGAMES POKEMON GO VID KINDA EFFED ME UP. So Phan. Much innuendo. To be completely honest my favorite part was when Dan shook his bag with the cough syrup and was all like “So I’ve bought the drugs. Phil, you needy little shit.” I literally replayed that probably 10+ times and cackled shamelessly in the middle of the library. (Yes, I’m always at the library, grad students are boring nerds sorry) Now back to the story!!

“Cause I’m drifting away from you, away from you…” Phil flicked the water droplets from his pale fingers and raised his head, lips pursed on the last note, and was just brushing the tip of his freshly dyed black fringe from his eyes when he heard a small explosive sound, half like a cough and half like a sneeze, being suppressed from somewhere in the room. He froze.

Was there actually someone in one of the stalls listening to him?

“I’m sorry,” he called out in apology. Sheepishly he popped one of his earbuds out.

There was no reply - only the very slightest flash of black and color from the crack between the stall door and wall from its reflection in the mirror. Phil shrugged, feeling himself go red in the face all the same; perhaps the other guy was also listening to music and hadn’t heard his apology. Or maybe he was just as awkward as Phil was and couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Well, um, have a good day, then,” said Phil, feeling a tad stupid but unable to help that sunny side of himself. “I hope you enjoy the show!”

And with that, he was out the door and jogging down the winding carpeted halls toward the gigantic stadium, going over his opening lines in his head and already beginning to grin from ear to ear.

“Good morning, L.A.!” Phil shouted into the mic, waving into the flashing lights and the screaming melee, as he followed his fellow YouTubers into a queue in front of their armchairs on the stage. 

Phil almost never suffered from stage fright, contrary to popular belief, but it was always the first ten minutes of every show - regardless of where he was - that sent a rush of adrenaline surging through his veins and made the nerves tingle beneath his skin. He hadn’t been to VidCon in over two years, and it was almost disconcerting, speaking into the microphone without hearing another British voice chime in with his. He had gotten over it, of course. That was who he was as a person. But that did not mean he did not miss the tandem of his and Dan’s voices, of their jokes told in sync with one another.

About half an hour into the first panel, the host’s prepared questions from fans had switched to the topic of collaborations. Rosanna Pansino and Lindsey Stirling were laughing about some anecdote; without warning, PJ grabbed the mic from Phil’s hand and shouted: “Phil Lester is the absolute worst person ever to collab with.”

Phil buried his face in his hands, collapsing backward into the rainbow armchair. “That’s my line,” he mumbled.

PJ was grinning. “What’s that, Phil?” he yelled into the mic.

“Give it back…!” After a minute of grappling, Phil managed to finally extract the mic from PJ’s fist. “It’s PJ who is the absolute worst!”

The host was giggling. “Why’s that? Please explain.”

“Right,” said Phil. “So we all know how PJ’s got this sort of dreamy, fantasy-type sort of style in his videos, right? Whenever we collab, he wants to _direct_. Every detail, every little bit of color in the frame - ”

“Maybe you need more artistry in your frames!” PJ laughed, having reached over to borrow the mic again.

“But in all seriousness, remember that time you spilled plaster-of-Paris all over my hands and crotch - ”

“Not my fault, you were the one who insisted on applying it yourself!”

“Because we were sitting too close and I wanted to avoid an accident!” Phil rejoined, still grinning so much that his face hurt. 

“Philip - ” PJ cut him off with an overdramatic sigh. “Everybody in this room knows who’s the butterfingers, eh?”

At that, the stadium erupted into a deafening roar. Phil was left to hide once again behind his hands, peeking out between his fingers at the audience that was now madly cheering his endearing awkwardness. And just as his gaze flitted across the first several rows, he suddenly stopped and locked eyes with a chocolate brown pair that was so familiar that it sent a jolt of electricity through him.

Curly brown hair, long and untamed around the ears, hidden under a hood that cast a shadow so long that Phil was almost sure he’d made a mistake. But there was that chin, that quirk of the mouth in a half-ironic smile, the narrow and bony shoulders jutting upwards as the hands hid in the pockets of his skinny jeans.

Dan?

The man had seen him. No, the man had seen him and _made eye contact_ with him. Phil couldn’t breathe all of a sudden, and he would be lying if he said he didn’t want this all to be a hallucination, a beautiful nightmare, because otherwise he would have to wrap his head around the fact that Dan Howell was here, that he’d seen Phil being happy on stage with someone else, that Phil had been wrong all along and _Dan hadn’t forgotten about Phil at all_.

But as quickly as the hooded figure had appeared so clearly, so unequivocally, in Phil’s field of vision of the audience, he disappeared again, blending into the mass of screaming gray and black.

“...It’s all right, I often make Phil speechless, I think,” PJ was saying, slowly dragging Phil back into the present. The present. Dan Howell and the present, melded together, no longer made sense. Slowly, shakily but steadily, Phil Lester forced himself to breathe again.

~

Where the hell was Blake? Dan had been so sure Blake had been following closely behind him as they waded through the mass of fans to find their seats toward the front end of the stadium. They had even managed to sit down next to each other, he distinctly remembered, and when Dan had turned to the side to remark on something about the pattern of the lights, Blake had been signing something vague about the bathroom.

“Um, uh, sure, I’ll put our bag on your seat,” Dan stammered, but Blake hadn’t even granted him a reply before bolting so fast that Dan wondered if he’d have missed it if he’d blinked.

And then Phil had jogged up onto the stage, sporting that dark violet shirt and waving to the crowd, yelling into the mic with a confidence that took Dan by surprise, and Dan’s chest began to hurt. He was so close - but not close enough - he could have sworn he could almost see the ever-familiar pattern of veins in the skin of Phil’s face, the lines and curves in his pale hands, the individual hairs straying from his black fringe. The fringe was the same. The mouth, too, and the eyes - Dan didn’t even know why he’d thought anything would have changed about Phil.

But no, that was a lie: Phil had changed. It was subtle and unnerving, difficult to pinpoint but still insistently there, something about the shift in the lilt of Phil’s voice or the way he turned sideways less to consult with the YouTuber seated beside him, something about how the inflection of his tone was deeper and he spoke more quickly; or maybe it wasn’t his voice at all, but the way the ocean blue of his eyes sparked with a hidden boldness, even aggression, and the way he grabbed the mic right away to answer every question. The way Phil was...himself. And nothing more. Not Phil and Dan; not Phil and someone else; just Phil Lester.

It made Dan numb to watch him as Phil and PJ interacted on stage, and for the first time since he’d arrived at VidCon Dan began to feel the claws of regret sink into his brain.

It was definitely well over half an hour into the show, and Blake still had not returned. Maybe he hadn’t been able to get through the crowd and was forced to sit somewhere else, Dan told himself; but even that reasonable theory made him queasy.

His attention was divided. Phil and PJ were telling some sort of story involving plaster-of-Paris - Dan didn’t doubt it must have been hilarious - but this was not what he had wanted. To be frank, he didn’t even know what he had expected.

And then Phil shifted under the beam of the pulsing lights, laughing behind a hand to hide his tongue poking out between his teeth, and Phil _looked at him_.

There it was again, the _feeling_ , the abrupt and merciless tearing away from the comfort of his numbness. Dan hated it. He hated Phil’s ocean blue eyes, he hated the blush on his cheeks, he hated his own curly hair that he’d left undone as a form of disguise - but most of all, he hated how it only took one look between him and Phil for everything to come crashing down on him again.

This had been a mistake.

He had to look for Blake. No, first he needed fresh air and he needed to remember how to breathe, and then he needed to look for Blake.

He was stumbling through the crowd, flesh colliding with his, a cacophony of voices assaulting him that he had to close his eyes against for a moment so the migraine wouldn’t return. The floating sensation from his high was beginning to deflate. Five minutes later, he burst out of the stadium and found himself in an unfamiliar-looking hallway lined on either side by scarlet doors.

One set of doors was open, and Dan slipped through. He halted in his tracks. “Blake!”

The blonde man was sprawled awkwardly on a couch, clutching at his stomach, as a female security guard hovered nearby, hawk-like eyes observing Blake and the brown-haired newcomer from over the brim of her coffee cup.

Blake raised his eyes languidly to meet Dan’s. “Um...hey.” He cleared the scratchiness from his throat and signed _Hello_ with his right hand.

“What happened?” Dan blurted. “I was so worried - you didn’t come back - did you find the bathroom? Are you okay?”

“...Normally don’t let people in here, but your friend looked sick to the stomach,” said a female voice to Dan’s right, a little muffled. He glanced askance to find that the security guard had been speaking.

“I’m fine, Dan,” Blake insisted as the latter drew closer and knelt on the carpet by his side. _I just felt really dizzy for a while. Must be a stomach bug._

“Oh, no,” said Dan. “Was it the hot dogs I bought for you outside?”

“Probably,” replied Blake with a wan smile.

“Fuck - I’m such an idiot - ”

“Seriously, stop stressing, Dan. I was the one who said I was hungry.”

“But I should have _known_ better - ” Dan was about to berate himself further, but then the look that washed over Blake’s face just then was so positively green that out of reflex he seized the nearest trash can and thrust it under Blake’s chin.

“Ugh, I’m going to have to stand outside,” the security guard remarked. “I’m sorry, I just have a phobia. Do you need me to get medical help?”

Blake shakily held up his hand in a thumbs-up. “No thanks, I’ll be good,” he croaked.

Dan’s brow was knit in worry. He smoothed the now-matted blonde fringe from Blake’s forehead. It was sticky with fresh beads of sweat. “Blake, are you _sure_? You’re already burning up.”

The other cast him a trembling nod, but was instantly belied by another bout of sickness.

“That’s it, I’m getting somebody to take you to A&E,” Dan declared. He had to stand slowly to quell the quaking in his knees, but he was hell-bent on his mission. “Um, miss? Could you please stay with my boyfriend? Or - help me find someone - as quick as we can - ”

“All right,” the guard agreed after a second’s hesitation.

Dan didn’t wait to hear anything else and bolted back into the hallway. “We need a doctor, please! Or a nurse! Can anybody help?” He rounded a corner and then another, entered an unfamiliar section of the maze of corridors, and almost smacked into a cross-looking male security guard. “Sorry! I need help, please! Could you get an ambulance or a doctor or any kind of medical help? My boyfriend, he’s in that room, he’s really, really sick - throwing up all over the place - ”

The guard must have muttered something that Dan didn’t catch, but at least he took off in the opposite direction at a fairly clipped pace. Dan pivoted on his heel and began to pace, carding a hand through his curls, wondering where he even was. The panic was beginning to overwhelm him. He’d always been a tad neurotic, but being high and under stress at the same time only heightened all his senses to a cloying level. He had to figure out where he was and get back to Blake as soon as he could - 

“Dan?”

Dan froze. The voice came from behind him, somewhere, too close to be real, but he knew he’d heard it: it wasn’t a hallucination. It had to be real. So real that Dan’s heart trembled within him at this nightmare of a miracle.

 _Not now_ , one part of him whispered. But then the other one screamed: _Turn around. Turn around, now._

Slowly, ever so slowly that it almost pained him, Dan turned. 

The vision of black locks and wide eyes shining like ice assaulted him with such impact that Dan had to tell himself how to stand, how to swallow, how to - no. Fuck. All reason had left him.

Phil Lester’s lips were moving. Dan’s eyes fluttered closed so he could hear it again, just hear it, the purity of that voice.

“Oh my God, Dan. You’re real.”

The irony was too cruel for Dan not to notice. The same words, the same six words that Phil had spoken to him that evening on the platform of the train station in Manchester eleven years ago, these were the same six words coming out of his mouth again in this moment.

“What?” Dan heard himself say, and his voice was so scratchy and undignified, so small, almost scared; and the next thought flooding around in his mind was _Fuck, this was not how I wanted this conversation to go._

Phil’s gestures and words were choppy. “In the audience. Back there, a few minutes ago. I thought I saw you - but I could have been mistaken - but I wasn’t. You’re here. You’re you.”

Dan tugged his left hand from the pocket of his jeans then and drew it over his face, eyes closed again, and then he said: “Yeah. I’m here.” And the unwritten apology hung in the air, _I’m sorry, I’m here, I’m here like I should have been three years ago. I’m sorry I forgot about you, because I never did. I just forgot myself._ But he was no longer his articulate self, and he could not bring himself to say anything more without the threat of hot tears rising in the back of his throat.

“You grew out your hair.”

“Yeah, I did.” 

“It suits you.”

“It doesn’t,” said Dan. “But I had to.” After another beat: “You still look the same.” _But you’ve somehow already changed._

“Did you - did you come here, I mean, did you fly to VidCon? Are you - ”

“I live here.”

“...What?”

“I mean, I live nearby.” Oh, God. Dan lurched forward, ready to hold out his arms for a hug, and he didn’t know where the impulse had come from, but Phil shifted to the side just at that moment, and Dan had to shoot out a hand to grab onto the wall before he could lose his balance. And the next thing he knew, Phil’s hand was grasping his shoulder too, and he was speaking, the puff of his breath so close to Dan’s ear.

“Whoa there. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Dan said, for the ten millionth time in his life.

“You look so...thin.”

“I was always thin. A wet noodle, remember?” Dan dared to crack a smile at that instant, and after a heart-wrenching second of confusion on Phil’s part, Phil finally returned the small grin.

“Dan…”

“I know. We need to talk.”

“Well, that too, but I was going to say you need to sit down. You look close to death.”

“Thanks,” Dan shot back sarcastically. “Finally a step closer to my true self.”

“Dan, don’t do that.”

God, Phil knew. Somehow, he knew something about why Dan had left...or did he really? Phil’s tone was sober, unwilling to accept the jest. 

Dan swallowed heavily. “Do what?”

“Hide behind your snarkiness and pretend everything’s okay. I know you’re not. If only you’d just - ” Phil cursed himself internally for stumbling over his words; now that the most important moment of his life had come, he no longer remembered the thousands upon thousands of things he’d been saving up inside himself to say to his long-lost best friend. “I never heard from you again,” he finally choked out.

“I lost my cell service. Couldn’t afford it.”

“You could have messaged me on Facebook - Twitter - anything…?” Phil could hear himself, how he was begging. No. He had to stop. He was done with his days of apologizing for things he didn’t understand and things that weren’t his fault.

“Phil…” _I wanted to_. Dan was screaming inside, screaming all the things he should be saying aloud, but now he couldn’t bring himself to even stammer out a fraction of them. Instead, what came out was: “So you’re living with PJ now?”

Phil physically stumbled back as if Dan had punched him. “I - the rent - ”

“I know,” Dan replied hastily. He had to fix this; he wasn’t bitter, or even angry, but Phil had misread him. Oh God...Phil had _misread_ him, for the first time in forever. “I’m just, um, he’s a good choice for a roommate.”

“Dan, you really look like you’re about ready to keel over…”

“James.”

“What?”

“...I go by James.” Dan’s eyes were closed once more, and he was leaning harder against the wall for support, because everything was beginning to spin in the darkness behind his lids. “Just in public. I mean, in case - ”

“Of course. You’re completely off the internet, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess I can see why you wanted to do that. It gets too much, doesn’t it? The pressure and the fame. It’s just, the fans were left wondering…”

“It wasn’t that.”

“Oh.”

“And I’m really sorry about the fans. I’m sure you bore the brunt of it all after I...after everything, three years ago.” Dan couldn’t even say _after I left._ It was the most blasphemous thing he could say, to carelessly admit that he’d left, that he’d broken his very first promise to Phil when they’d become friends: _I’ll always be here._

“I hope you’re enjoying life now, at the very least,” Phil said sincerely.

Dan shrugged. “It wasn’t the fans that made me do it. It was just me, I guess.” It was vague, he know, and far less than Phil, of all people, deserved to know. But how did one just talk about wanting to kill himself every day, and not knowing whether the next step across the train platform, across the ocean, across the sky, would lead him to that missing something that he forever ached for?

“Shit,” Phil breathed. That made Dan’s eyes fly open, and he saw where Phil’s gaze was directed. The stadium doors were opening and voices were tumbling out en masse, and camera lights were suddenly going off, and Dan’s heart began to beat a little quicker again as the fans poured into the corridors.

“The meet and greet - I almost forgot - ”

“Go,” said Dan through gritted teeth.

“What?”

“Just go! They need you. I don’t even know why you left the show - ”

“Meet me at entrance F, okay?” Phil was already jogging backward in the direction of one of the rear doors. He cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted again: “Entrance F. At four o’clock. Okay?”

Dan wasn’t sure if he nodded or not. All he knew was that he was rooted to the carpet, stunned, and that he did not wake from his trance-like state until suddenly a gurney wheeled around the corner and his memory flooded back to life and he jogged up to join Blake and the paramedics.

“You’ll be okay,” he whispered to Blake, squeezing his hand. “You’ll be okay, all right? I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s not like I’m gonna die,” Blake croaked out, his eyes closed but his mouth twisted in a grin as he let his head loll back on the stretcher.

“You’re making me feel like you are dying. Don’t die on me, dork.”

“Hey. You’re the dork.”

“Shut up,” said Dan, not unkindly, and he ran his fingers again through Blake’s fringe. “Just rest, okay? I’ll be there when you wake up.”

“I feel so stupid - wrapped up on a stretcher because of a hot dog - ”

“Oh, shut it. Food poisoning is serious business.”

“Will you ride with me?”

“Definitely.”

~

Seven thirty-seven, his phone told him. For the billionth time Phil clicked the screen on and then off and shoved it back into his pocket. The breeze had already turned bitterly cold for a June night, and Phil wished he’d brought his jacket as he waited. His joints were already growing stiff and he had to jog in place to relieve the pressure on them from where he had been standing for eternity outside Entrance F.

Dan had to have heard him. He had nodded when Phil told him Entrance F. There was no other entrance called that, was there? Phil had double-checked the map of the building at least sixteen times.

“Phil! Are you coming? Everybody’s leaving for dinner already.”

Cat was waving from across the parking lot, yelling and trying to get Phil’s attention; PJ was at her side, beckoning to him too.

“Just one more minute, okay?” Phil pleaded.

“What are you even waiting for?” PJ called out, venturing across the parking lot to draw a little closer to Phil.

“Um, nothing - just really needed time to think, I guess - away from people…” Phil’s voice dissolved into an unintelligible mumble.

Cat had joined PJ and the two were standing right in front of Phil now. “Look, I think dinner will make you feel better, whatever it is,” she said gently. “Aren’t you starving?”

“And you can always talk to one of us about it,” PJ added.

Phil risked one more glance at his phone - 7:39 p.m. - and finally, reluctantly, rewarded them with a nod. “All right then. You guys choose, I don’t care where we eat.”

And it was true, he really didn’t care anymore. Cat took the steering wheel and PJ claimed the passenger seat, while Phil crawled into the back of the sedan and curled up on himself and gazed out the window, absorbing the pulse of the street lights but not seeing anything, hating the reflection of his pale and thin visage on the cool glass. A trickle of moisture fell unbidden down his cheek, and he shut his eyes angrily against it, denying its presence, and he leaned back against the seat again and hugged himself by the elbows, because - because the one person he could have hugged today had been nothing more than a cruel dream, one that would never return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Guys, I’m really sorry that my updates aren’t as frequent as I would like them to be. I strive to post weekly, but from a realistic standpoint I can only update every week and a half or every other week. I actually had most of this chapter written down several days ago, but the first two weeks back at university have been STRESSFUL AF. To be fair, I did spend my summer writing my honors thesis and doing a bunch of accelerated classes, but still. Everything about this semester is going to suck, I can tell...had a fair number of anxiety attacks on campus and apparently I actually collapsed from fatigue in one of my classes?? And it was the guy who has a crush on me who caught me??? Awkward. Plus, my ex-best-friend/ex-almost-boyfriend with whom I had a falling out over the summer shares a bunch of classes with me, it turns out...and we’re studiously ignoring each other. Even more awkward So yeah it hasn’t been the most conducive set of circumstances for writing top-quality heart-wrenching Phan material, but hey, at least I tried  
> ALSO, as promised, here is the playlist I made for this fic! (You know what else sucks about being deaf in one ear? _Headphones_.) You can either [go straight to the Youtube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awr_jzijeIU&list=PLFpbIcETu2OdRwRTxzyFHz80D1g-QVfmB) or [view it along with my edit on Tumblr](http://theoceanismyinkwell.tumblr.com/post/150055944678/playlist-for-east-side-is-a-paradise-of).  
>  And another business announcement: I’ve made an author page for myself on Facebook! It’s [@AuthorMaeB](http://www.facebook.com/AuthorMaeB), and I post not only playlists, edits, and summaries there, but also sneak peeks of chapters and new stories I’m working on. :) Speaking of which, I’m planning a new chaptered phanfic, this time more Phil-centered, called Your Freudian Slip. You can check out the summary [here](http://theoceanismyinkwell.tumblr.com/post/149949533103/an-overview-of-the-covers-ive-made-for-all-my).  
> ...Aaaand back to the story!! WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT? WHY DIDN'T DAN SHOW UP? WHAT IS PHIL GOING TO DO NOW? Trust me, now even I am dying of the feels. Sorry not sorry. -M


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: WARNING -- This chapter contains a hospital scene, mentions needles, and has a very long conversation involving depression and s*****al thoughts. It's an extremely important conversation to the plot, but I want you to please stay safe, peeps! So here is a summary of the entire chapter below the spoiler alert line for this who wish to skip reading this update:
> 
> *****SPOILER ALERT*****  
> Dan takes Blake to the hospital, and it turns out it was just mild food poisoning. On his way home to get some sleep before coming back to visit Blake in the morning, Dan finally decides to call Phil back and explain himself. The conversation goes well at first, but then Phil needs answers, and Dan explains that he and Phil can't just get back into each other's lives because his depression and distant nature would just ruin Phil as a person. Phil stubbornly insists that they can work through their issues, leading Dan to slip up and reveal that he planned to off himself when he left three years ago. Shocked, Phil wants to come get Dan so they can have a proper talk face-to-face, but Dan knows he's gone too far and does the only thing he can think of to keep Phil away: he lies and says he never actually wants to see Phil again, and that he's moved on.

Dan was well acquainted with that tipsy sensation of stumbling across a floor that seemed to shift underneath his feet while operating on less than two hours of sleep within the span of three days. He did not do it often - the biology of his own body dictated that he crash sooner or later - but sometimes, when the classic dread set in at four in the morning in the gleaming darkness of his room, he could not help but lie there with his eyes wide open for hours.

The ambience of the hospital did not help at all with his nerves. Dan paced to and fro for what seemed like hours across the tiny space in front of the curtained-off area where Blake lay sleeping. Sometimes he felt compelled to come stand by his side and smooth the blonde locks again from Blake’s forehead; but other times the sickly, ashen hue underneath his dewy cheekbones frightened Dan, and he walked away again as far as he could toward the opposite wall, wringing his hands and shaking out his knees from sheer anxiety.

A nurse came stalking in from around the corner with a frightening expression of determination on her face. Dan couldn’t blame her. After all, it was the ER. But he couldn’t help gulping when she addressed him. “Mr. Howell?”

“Um, yes?”

“Sorry for the delay, it’s been a hectic evening here, as you can see. If no one else has informed you yet, you should know your boyfriend will be okay. Seems to have been a bit of minor food poisoning, but we’ve taken the appropriate tests and plugged him into the necessary IVs to rehydrate him, so he’ll be fine. He asked for some painkillers, but we can’t really do that in a delicate gastrointestinal situation like this, so we just gave him a safe sleeping aid. He should be out of it for the next several hours.”

“Thanks.” Dan rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you know approximately when he should be awake again?”

“Er…” The nurse shuffled over quickly to the side, yanked back the curtain, and grabbed an abused-looking red folder from the clear plastic compartment built into the foot of Blake’s bed. She flipped cursorily through the first couple of pages before pausing on one. “The meds were given to him exactly five hours ago, so I’d say he won’t be conscious again for at least the next twenty hours. I know you are anxious about his condition, Mr. Howell, but I’d suggest you go home and get your rest. He should still be here in the morning. We’d like to keep him here in the ER, of course, just to monitor his vitals and ensure that the appropriate staff are available in case anything takes a turn for the unexpected.”

“Yeah, of course. I understand. Thanks.” As the nurse nodded back at Dan and made her exit, he pivoted on his heel and wandered over to Blake’s bedside again, sighing. He didn’t exactly have a phobia of needles, but they did freak him out somewhat, and seeing his boyfriend’s arms stuck through in various places with them with IV tubes attached to his skin certainly wasn’t helping.

“Just wake up already, dork,” Dan muttered, half at Blake’s inert form and half to himself. He was already regretting five hundred seventy percent of this entire day, if that was even humanly possible -- getting them both tickets to VidCon, buying that stupid hot dog, watching Phil on stage, actually _running into_ Phil in -- no. That was a perilous path to return to, so Dan shut down his mind on that memory as quickly as he could. Still, some part of him could not help cringing at what an utter asshat he must have come across as to Phil, after not having seen him in three whole freaking years.

 _You were supposed to meet Phil at Entrance F,_ Dan thought.

_No, too late for that now._

_You could text him. Or DM him. Explain that you didn’t mean to be such a flake._

“What would be the point?” Dan said aloud. He picked at the threads protruding from the hem of his jacket.

_That’s your best friend, Dan. The one who saved you. The one who has been there for you for such a long part of your life._

Dan whispered: “So was Blake.”

_But only you know what you owe Phil._

Yes. Yes, Dan knew, he very well did. There was not a day that went by that a tiny part of him didn’t beat himself up over it. But sometimes guilt and anger, though they were two very different things, started to resemble each other when Dan’s mind went to dark places.

_I’d only ruin him. He doesn’t deserve me. And besides, Phil has obviously survived without me. He’s happy._

With that train of thought running around in messy circles in his brain, Dan leaned back against the wall and sunk down until he hit the tiles, and he let his head hang forward a little over his knees as he pulled his arms in around himself and closed his eyes. The welcome darkness of dreamless sleep took him almost instantly, but then was just as swiftly punctuated by the ding of an incoming text message. As if fate could never leave him to wallow comfortably in his misery, Dan thought in the bleary vestiges of his sarcasm.

It was not, as he had dared to hope for a miraculous fraction of a second, Phil Lester. It was his mother, though this time the topic was not as far from Phil as he would have expected.

_Sorry for the late message, but I wanted to ask you before I forgot. Did you ever call Phil back?_

Dan frowned, disoriented for a minute. It was past two in the morning and therefore around ten where his mother was -- not an unusual time for her to be up these days. Well, she certainly was no stranger to his unhealthy sleep schedule. He quickly tapped out a reply. _What do you mean? When did Phil call?_

His mother must have been shocked at the speed of his response. Never before in the last three years had he been this conversational over text. Her next message came within the minute. _I’m sorry, I was so sure I told you. Phil called to ask about you several weeks ago._

For some reason that one sentence made Dan’s stomach knot inward on itself in an endless, hollow pit. Phil had called. He hadn’t forgotten about Dan or moved on -- not completely, at least. Very quickly then Dan’s brain zoomed through the possible scenarios; Phil must have tried to call Dan’s old number first, logically speaking, before calling Dan’s mum. He mused for a few moments what it must have been like to hear the robotic voice on the other end of the line telling Phil that the line no longer existed. But that was too masochistic a situation to dwell on, and Dan shook his head.

 _Guess I didn’t get the memo,_ Dan texted back. What a lame joke.

_Sorry for not telling you sooner. You should call him back. I don’t think he has your new number. He sounded pretty anxious to me._

Dan was severely tempted to leave the conversation at that, if only to satisfy a bit of his misdirected vengeance at his mother for not revealing this information sooner. But then the rational side of him won out, and he settled on sending her a terse but polite _I’ll check up on him when I get the chance. Thanks._

That settled it. Dan needed to go home and get some sleep in a proper bed. As much as he hated to leave Blake here, the hospital atmosphere was suffocating him and he felt that somehow it was unfair -- betrayal, even -- to have thoughts like this with his boyfriend unconscious five feet away from him. He clambered to his feet, dusted off his jacket, and after a soft peck on Blake’s cheek, walked noiselessly out of the sliding doors of the ER into the bitter nip of the night air.

That fragile timeline that hangs been normal bedtime and morning is perhaps when a human is most vulnerable. This was another thing which Dan knew for a fact, and though he’d hoped for the cold breeze to bring him back to his senses and somehow settle his resolve never to contact Phil again, he instead found himself wavering even more. Finally, as he passed under the lethargic pulse of a street light on his way toward his flat, he pulled out his phone again and let his fingers take over.

Phil answered on the sixth ring, just when Dan was about to chicken out and hang up and pretend the call had never happened.

“Dan? Is everything all right?”

Dan winced and took a second to turn down his hearing aids to cut out the whining interference. “Nothing -- fine. I’m fine,” he managed to stammer back, after a beat.

“I’m really glad to hear from you. I thought something might have -- maybe you -- something happened, when you didn’t show up earlier.”

“I’m sorry,” Dan mumbled, quite sure Phil hadn’t heard him.

“Are you okay?”

 _No. Nothing’s okay and it never will be okay until I figure all my shit out and all I want right now is for you to come get me._ But Dan didn’t say any of those things; what he said instead, after clearing his throat, was: “Hope you didn’t wait too long for me back there. Sorry, I should have called sooner.”

The pause was too long for Dan to believe that Phil was telling the truth. “No, I didn’t wait too long. Where are you?”

Dan pretended not to hear the last question. “I’m guessing the afterparties are over for the night? Or am I interrupting something?”

“Not at all.” Phil’s little laugh crackled over the receiver and Dan found a smile rising unbidden to his own face in return. “I’m an old man now, you’re forgetting. I retire early to the privacy of my hotel room.”

“That sounded way more suggestive than you intended it to, I’m sure,” Dan remarked drily.

“Shut up!”

“Never.”

“What about you? Back safe at home and relaxing, I hope?”

There was no avoiding the question now, Dan supposed. He sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Believe it or not, I am standing outside right now under a full moon and watching the silhouettes of my two obnoxious neighbors making out in front of a third-story window.”

A full two seconds of disbelieving silence passed, and then Phil’s breathless laugh filtered through. “Actually, I believe you, you perv. That would be relaxing for you, wouldn’t it?”

“Ew. Actually shut up and never speak again, Phil.”

“I thought you were dying to hear my voice, Dan.”

“What?”

“Erm…” It sounded like Phil was chewing his lip. “You didn’t really call me just to describe your neighbors’ risqué encounters by the moonlight, did you?”

“Look, I never meant to bail on you. I brought a -- a friend -- to VidCon.” Great, now Dan was stuttering and sounded even more credible. Why couldn’t he just say boyfriend? “Um, he had a hotdog from one of those stands outside, you know those? Well...he got food poisoning -- ”

“Oh my God! Is he okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, he is now, but I had to take him to A&E -- I mean the ER.”

“Oh, wow. I’m so sorry, Dan, I had no idea -- ”

“Well, ’course you wouldn’t, because I was a fucking idiot and didn’t call you -- ”

“Literally, you can stop right there.” Phil’s voice was trembling; or maybe Dan was only imagining it. Was it relief? Sadness? Anxiety? Dan wanted to kick himself for not being able to tell. “I gotta say, I was a teeny bit mad at you for not showing up this afternoon, Dan. I didn’t know what to think. Then...I guess...I got all depressed about it...thought you’d walk right out of my life again forever.”

Shit. This was not the way Dan wanted this conversation to go. He made a face as he looked back up at the moon for inspiration, lower lip between his teeth in a grimace. Phil could not get attached to him: that was out of the question. But when Phil put it that way -- that Dan was about to walk out on him again, for the second time -- Dan knew in the depths of his stomach that he’d made a terrible mistake by calling him back.

“Phil,” Dan interrupted him, speaking softly. “I haven’t -- I haven’t left, not exactly.”

“Well.” Phil snorted into the receiver, and for a moment the edge of his sarcasm was too sharp for Dan to dismiss. “You did stop posting to YouTube or Twitter or Tumblr or any form of social media at all. More importantly, you stopped answering my calls or texting me back. Oh, and shall we forget? You literally packed your bags and walked off to some train station in the middle of the night headed for God knows where.”

Dan had to sit down. The cement of the sidewalk felt cold and almost wet underneath him, but he slid down against the lamppost toward the ground anyway. Phil never screamed or yelled when he was angry; in fact, he couldn’t say he had ever really seen Phil angry before. But this -- this, he knew, was the picture of Phil’s anger. The shaking voice, the clipped syllables and acerbic words, the eerily calm tone.

“I’m asking for a little understanding here,” Dan said at last, his voice very small.

“Understanding? Dan, I’m just overwhelmed and so very grateful to have found you out of the blue, after all these years, healthy and alive. Then you bail on me -- I get that that wasn’t your fault, and I do sincerely hope your friend is all right -- but what else did you expect me to think? You left once, without any reason, so why should I ever expect you to keep your word and come back again? And _then_ we have a little conversation on the phone that starts to go a little well and I forgive you, of course I’ve already forgiven you, but then you come in with all this crap about ‘never having really left’!”

“I know, I -- ”

“Let me finish, Dan!”

Dan flinched. Phil never spoke to him like that.

“I’m worried for you, Dan. Of course I’m worried. I’ve been worried since the day you left and I haven’t stopped worrying about you up to today. You may not believe it, but guess what? I wasn’t the one who unplugged out of every viable mode of contact, changed their name, and moved _across the fucking ocean._ ”

“Phil, it’s not what you think!”

“And what is it that you think I think? You promised never to leave, Dan. What did I ever do to you? Things were going so well -- ”

“It’s not because of you that I left!” Dan yelled. The diaphanous puff of his breath in the June air of three a.m. filled the next two beats of silence, and then he spoke again, modulating his scratchy voice. “It’s not because of the fans, either. That would be stupid.”

Phil gave a crackly sigh. “I know. That was the only reason I could think of.”

“Phil…” Now it was Dan’s voice that was cracking. He had to take another moment to pull the speaker away from his mouth, rest his forehead on his knee, and draw a deep breath from somewhere within him before returning to the conversation. As he breathed out his next few words, he lifted his gaze back up the sky and rested his head against the cool comfort of the steel lamppost. “You’re such a happy person, do you know that?”

“Dan, I -- ”

“I look up at the moon and I fucking think of death amid all its beauty,” Dan went on. “But you, you just...you’re too good for anybody. You trip over in public and the first thing you think of is the babies that might hear you cussing. You ply free hot chocolate to anyone with even an inkling of a problem on their mind. Your best friend walks out on you and disappears for years without a proper explanation, and you spend all that time worrying about them instead of being angry, and thinking that it must have been something you did wrong instead of accepting the fact that they’re just a total dickhead. Which I am. I acknowledge that. I’m sorry, though I know there aren’t enough sorry’s in infinity to express my regret.”

“...I don’t quite see how this relates to me being a happy person.”

“Don’t you get it? I’ll ruin you. I’m no good for you. I never will be. You’d be stuck with picking up the pieces every step of the way, and you of all people deserve so much more than that. It would be better -- easier, and better -- if I just stepped out of your life for good, and things just stayed that way.”

“Did you seriously just say you’re leaving again? Dan, everyone deserves somebody to be there for them.”

“...It doesn’t have to be you.”

“Will you stop talking like that!” There was something just then like the shatter of glass or ceramic on a stone surface, and Dan flinched again. Phil muttered some apology in the background and could be heard scraping up clinking piles of shards from the floor.

“Leave it, you’ll cut yourself. The cleaner will take care of it.”

Phil ignored him. “You talk like this is all about you. What if I need someone to lean on, too? You’re my _best friend_. And you took that away from me.”

The length of a single heartbeat, and then: “You’re my best friend, too.”

Dan thought Phil had hung up, or maybe dropped the phone or stopped listening to him, because for several interminable seconds he heard nothing. And then, finally, Phil rewarded him with another long, deep sigh. “Then let’s get back to being that, Dan. We can start over. Or -- or pick up where we left off.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. I couldn’t do that to you. I just can’t.”

“Dan, _I need you_.”

“No, you don’t. You think you do, but look how well you’ve done without me. You’ll get over me, believe me. I only drag you down, Phil. You’re better off on your own. What you did on stage earlier today?” Dan managed to huff out a dry laugh. “You’re Phil. Not Dan _and_ Phil. Not Phil _without_ Dan. You’ve gotten to be your own person and be recognized for your own talent and creativity, and you’ve blossomed and -- ” He took a shuddering breath. “ -- And I can’t ruin that for you.”

“We don’t even have to be Dan _and_ Phil,” the other man pleaded. “Just Phil who has a best friend named Dan. Come on. Don’t be like this.”

Dan choked. Closed his eyes. “I’m not even supposed to be here, Phil.”

“What?”

“I was meant to disappear. For real. Why do you think I didn’t bring any of my important things with me from the flat?”

“But you did disappear -- ”

“You’re not understanding me.”

“What -- _oh._ ”

Dan counted out the seconds on his fingers. One, two, three, four. Then:

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because -- ” Great, now Dan was crying. He had always been such a hopeless sap. He took a few moments to let the hot tears slide down silently and suppress a quiet sob. Phil didn’t need to hear him like this right now. “How does one even begin to explain something like this?”

“I would have listened. Oh, Dan. You know I would have.” Something choked on the other end of the line, and it almost sounded as if Phil was holding back a good cry himself. “I’d give absolutely anything in the world to make you happy again. If only you’d told me. Oh my God, I’m so... _relieved_ to be able to be talking to you right now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dan with a wet sniffle, for lack of knowing what else to say.

“Don’t. Look, where the heck are you? I am coming to get you right this instant.”

“No!” That came out a bit sharper than Dan had intended, causing him to wince.

“Why not?”

“Look, this is all three-a.m. talk. I shouldn’t even have called. This was a mistake. Consider me drunk, and nothing I said tonight really matters.”

“But -- ”

“I only called to say I appreciate your previous offer to hang out, but we really can’t. I’m not doing this. We are better off living our separate lives, simple and uncomplicated. I won’t call you again, so don’t call me. And don’t try to come looking for me.”

“Dan, don’t you _dare_ hang up!”

“I am and I will.”

“I could never forgive myself if -- ”

“I’m not going to off myself tonight, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Dan said coldly through the vestiges of his tears. Then he sucked in a deep breath to prepare himself for the grand lie, the one that would truly convince Phil to stay away forever. “I have a new life now, Phil, and I want to keep it that way. I’m going to school and I have a new job. The past is the past. That part of our history where our lives intersected is over. Trying to go back to it now is just going to bring on a load of hurt and secrets you don’t want to know. I’m choosing this, okay? I want this. I don’t want you back in my life, Phil. Goodbye.”

“ _Dan_!”

Dan hadn’t been able to hang up fast enough to cut out that single, final cry of a broken voice on the other end of the line. His shoulders quivered once with a noiseless sob, and then he let the phone drop with a clatter onto the pavement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry for the actually super late update. I was drowning in like three simultaneous 10-page papers for my Spanish lit classes and a bunch of exams and a video filming project, which is always super fun X) Also, I don’t think I’ve ever taken the time to officially thank all of you guys for the kind and thoughtful and super supportive comments you’ve left for this fic. Well, thank you SO MUCH. It really means bucketloads to me. Writing this phanfic has been one of the only things that has grounded me lately, and I’m never gonna stop until it’s finished.  
> You guys may or may not know this about me, but I have an anxiety disorder that makes waking up each day and going to school a nightmare. I love what I’m doing, but the pressure of socializing and my actual workload get overwhelming and I get severe tunnel vision and nasty panic attacks. When I was a freshman in college, I spent a year in severe depression, had a short-lived relationship that I thought would solve my emotional problems but only compounded them when it ended, and then gradually got better over the years. Well...lately I’ve been having depression. Again. That certainly hasn’t helped with my motivation to do my work, and in turn my procrastination has been setting off my anxiety, you see what I mean? Eh. These days, my mind teeters on the dangerous brink somewhere between caring too much and not caring at all...I’ve talked to my sister about it (she’s studying medicine to be a psychiatrist), and she helps loads, but of course the road back to recovery isn’t instant. I don’t even know where I am right now on the spectrum. I’ve called some s****** hotlines recently, and they’ve helped too. We’ll see where that goes.  
> With that being said, I hope you accept my sincerest apologies for disappearing for a while, and thank you so much for sticking with the story! Hope you’re enjoying it so far! (Sorry for being sort of Satan lmao)


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Tw for suggested s****al thoughts and drug use.

He wasn’t even sure what woke him up the next morning. Maybe it was the fact that he’d left the blinds and curtains open again, so now the full wrath of the sun was streaming in across his inert body on the couch like burning lashes. Dan hated the sun. He found comfort in the moon, but the sun to him was nothing but rage and hypocrisy.

 

Dan groaned and struggled to collect all his limbs in a coherent manner as he eased into a sitting position. The cold, hard outline of his phone in his rear pocket suddenly jolted him awake. He dug it out: it was past 11 a.m. and there were seventeen missed calls from Blake. Shit.

 

 _I’m getting discharged at 9. Nurse told me she had you go home for the night. Pick me up when you wake up? :)_ read the last text.

 

Shit, shit, shit. Dan couldn’t help berating himself with a string of imprecations as he sprang into action, dashing around the apartment for a clean t-shirt, new socks and a granola bar from the cabinet. As he stumbled down the stairs, his left foot still wedged only halfway into his trainer, he managed to shoot a clumsy text back to Blake. _So so soo sry. Rough nite idk wt happened to my alarm. B there in 20._

 

Blake’s reply was instantaneous. _Great! It’s ok that’s what I thought happened. Take your time. Luv u xx_

 

Dan had his hand on the door handle of his car when he opened the last text. A deep, quivering breath somehow found its way out of his chest. _Luv u too xx_ , he finally texted back, and threw himself into the driver’s seat.

 

Everything was going wrong. He hadn’t had his morning coffee or hot chocolate, but for some reason his hands and veins were already shaking. He blinked several times before his view of the asphalt in front of him finally cleared, and he narrowly missed braking for the glaringly crimson stop sign. Seemingly out of nowhere, a blonde woman appeared in front of his windshield, gesturing obscenely and shouting in his face as she balanced a wide-eyed toddler in one arm. The realization hit him, and Dan squeaked out an apology--an apology that he could not hear. With his engine still idling at the intersection, he dove for the glove compartment and rummaged through, hoping against hope that maybe those old hearing aids he’d lost a long time ago might have somehow magically appeared there. But no, there was nothing.

 

Dan found himself trembling again. He let his head fall forward with an inaudible thump against the steering wheel and forced himself to draw deep breaths, one after another, one after another, and then one more, to steel himself against the inevitable quaking all over his body that he knew was imminent. The tiniest part of his brain whispered that there was nothing to cry about, that the California sun was shining unabashedly through his car window and that Blake was waiting with a patient smile in the lobby of a hospital only ten minutes away, and yet he knew--he knew. Everything was wrong.

 

He didn’t even want to think about last night’s phone call. Or rather, the biggest mistake of his life yet.

 

He knew there were probably missed texts from Phil, but he’d deleted the notifications with his clumsy fingers before he could be tempted to open them. He had to fall back on his old strategy: compartmentalize, lock away the memories, face forward and pretend everything was okay. Yes, that was what he would have to do. It was only a ten-minute drive. He could do this. Dan almost reached over to turn on the radio for some soothing melody to keep him company, but then he remembered he’d still forgotten his bloody aids and he still couldn’t hear. Some things never changed.

 

Blake was seated in the lobby just as he’d imagined it, no powder blue hospital gown on but his cozy red sweatshirt somehow looking more gigantic on him than usual. His blonde fringe was unwashed and uncombed. He sprang up from the wheelchair as soon as Dan entered through the sliding glass doors, and he had his arms out, yelling something with the biggest grin Dan had ever seen on his face in the longest while.

 

When they hugged, Dan wanted to feel like had come home. He truly did. The familiar smell of Blake’s scruff almost triggered the ache of nostalgia inside him, but the better part of his sensibility knew it wasn’t enough, and that he was only trying to see stars where there was nothing but a cloudy sky.

 

“I’m so, so, so sorry I didn’t come to get you earlier,” Dan babbled. “It was like three in the morning when I got back to the flat--”

 

Blake laid a comforting hand on his shoulder to shush him. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t stress about it.”

 

“Another thing,” said Dan sheepishly. “I forgot my aids. I was gonna go back for them, but I don’t even bloody remember where I put them, and I didn’t want to keep you waiting any longer…”

 

 _That’s fine_ , Blake signed. _We can look for them together when we get back. I was just hoping to run by McDonald’s first? I can drive._

 

“Okay,” Dan choked out.

 

Blake’s eyebrows knit together at that. _Are you okay? Relax, Dan._

 

“I don’t--I’m okay. I don’t know. I almost run over a woman and her baby. All because of the stupid hearing aids. Fuck--I’m sorry, I’ve been really worried about you. What did the doctor say? Are you gonna be okay? Do you feel pain anywhere?”

 

_I’m okay. There’s nothing to panic about. They gave me some painkillers just in case but all I need to do is rest and eat in small quantities._

 

Dan nodded--though what he was nodding at exactly, he no longer knew--and with all the awkwardness of a twelve-year-old, he took his hands out of his pockets again and attacked Blake in another hug. “Again, I’m sorry.”

 

He could feel the vibration of Blake’s low chuckle against his shoulder. When they pulled away, Blake cleared his throat and signed, _I already signed the release papers. I think they want you to sign something else and then we can finally get out of here._

 

~

 

Everything continued to set Dan off that entire day. The flickering lights of the broken McDonald’s sign almost made him want to vomit. Later, as he and Blake were settled against the throw pillows of the couch with fries and milkshakes in hand, Dan got up again and paced to and fro for a full minute before escaping into the kitchen on the pretext of getting plates and soda. He knew Blake was calling after him, but he didn’t turn around. He couldn’t. 

 

As Dan busied his hands with the therapeutic unscrewing of the Coke bottle cap, he suddenly sensed another presence behind him. Blake had actually stood up to follow him and was now leaning stiffly against the kitchen doorway. In his left hand he held Dan’s phone, which was lighting up with an incoming call.

 

“It’s from Eddie,” Blake explained and signed.

 

Dan’s lips were dry. He licked them. “Shit,” he said, very quietly and devoid of any more feeling.

 

“Do you want me to take it?”

 

 _Yes, please,_ Dan signed. _Still haven’t found my aids._ “Tell him to please tell the boss not to be mad. It was an emergency and I forgot to come in today,” he added aloud.

 

Blake nodded and took the call, never budging from his spot against the kitchen doorframe so that Dan could read his lips and know what he was saying to Eddie. The call could not have lasted longer than two minutes, but to Dan it felt like halfway to eternity.

 

Dan suddenly realized the foam of the Coke was brimming over the top of the glass and he jerked his hand back. After a small, interminable silence in which he did nothing but stand and watch the foam bubble over onto the counter and then spill onto the tiles, he finally cleared his throat and looked back up at Blake. Neither of them had moved. “How mad is he?” Dan asked in a tiny voice.

 

“Oh, Eddie’s not mad,” said Blake. “Apparently somebody called Warren is, though.”

 

Another sigh escaped Dan; he somehow found the energy to draw a hand slowly over his face. “That’s the dickhead who ratted me out for not telling him I’m deaf.”

 

“Er, yeah.” Blake switched to signing. _I remember._

 

“So?” Dan prompted him. “What does Warren want?”

 

Blake looked as though he were struggling to put the matter as delicately as possible. “Um, he might have...mentioned something about you not coming back to the office ever.”

 

There was no shift whatsoever in Dan’s expression, nor the inflection of his voice. The next thing they knew, the ceramic plate in Dan’s other hand had slipped from his grasp, tumbled two turns in midair, and shattered against the kitchen floor. Blake flinched.

 

“Dan?”

 

His voice remained monotone. “I’m sorry. I’ll clean it up. Are there any more fries left?”

 

“Dan, did you hear me? I mean--not hear, but you know what I mean. Warren basically fired you. I tried to reason with Eddie--”

 

“And Eddie couldn’t do anything about it, I assume. Forget about it. It was bound to happen anyway.” Dan toed a pile of shards toward the bigger pile in the center of the floor, then hissed and jerked back his foot when one of the pieces sliced his tender flesh.

 

“Leave it,” Blake said loudly. He peeled himself from the kitchen doorway and walked briskly to the middle of the kitchen, obviously to bend down and grab the broom and dustpan from the cabinet, but it wasn’t what Dan saw: instead, he flinched, bodily, and he stumbled backward in an attempt to find the living room again.

 

Blake froze. “Dan. It’s okay. I’m not going to touch you. I just...need to get the dustpan…”

 

“I’m fine,” Dan insisted. He knew he was speaking louder than necessary, but things were spinning out of his control, including his own words.

 

Slowly, Blake straightened up again from his crouching position, hands out in a soothing gesture. “Let’s forget about the plate, okay? Come back to the living room with me. Let’s just talk. Or--” He must have seen the flash of panic cloud Dan’s eyes, because he quickly added, “Or we could just cuddle and not talk at all. We still have a milkshake left. I’ll bring your soda, there okay? Dan? Are you even seeing me?”

 

The truth was that Dan wasn’t even fully present anymore. Eyes glazed over, he swayed a few seconds before his reflexes made him catch himself with a hand on the counter, and he raised his gaze to meet Blake’s without actually registering his boyfriend’s moving lips or wide-eyed visage.

 

 _I’m a failure,_ Dan signed.

 

Blake visibly stiffened. He looked as though he knew exactly what Dan had signed, but he still replied: _What?_

 

_I don’t know why I even thought any of this would actually turn out okay._

 

Gingerly, very gently, Blake sidestepped the pile of ceramic shards and laid a hand on the side of Dan’s arm and steered him back toward the living with long, slow strides.

 

Dan’s signing was getting faster and more frantic. _I thought this was what I wanted. I thought I’d be happy. You’d be happy. We could be happy together. You got food poisoning because I had to go and drag you to that stupid YouTube thing and now I can’t even get my simple life in order. For fuck’s sake I’m going back to school for the second time. This shouldn’t even be hard. Why do I always have to fuck everything up?_

 

“No, Dan,” Blake said firmly. “No. You haven’t fucked everything up. This is just a little--no, don’t sign so fast, I can’t follow.” He locked his icy blue eyes with Dan’s, both of them lost and panicking as they sought the home in each other’s gazes that they would never find. “Please, Dan, stop doing this to yourself. This isn’t the end of the world! You can find another internship! Take a gap year--or a semester off--you don’t need to put this pressure on yourself. You’re still young and there’ll be thousands of other opportunities still waiting for you when you come back to them. You need to--”

 

 _I already failed at law_ , Dan continued to sign. _I fucked up. My parents wouldn’t stop reminding me of that and I know I fucked up. Then I tried to make my own living but I just had to get stupid depression and anxiety and walk away from the only career I knew. I thought I could start over here. I thought I was young, you know? But I’m not. Time doesn’t stop, Blake. Time keeps going. What’s the point? Time waits for no one. Who even really matters in the grand scheme of things?_

 

“Dan, slow down.”

 

_I’m sorry I dragged you into this, Blake. I really am. I love you and I’m so glad we’ve had this time together but--_

 

Swift as a dart, Blake seized Dan’s hands and squeezed them together between his own fists, his fists that were trembling, and he made eye contact with his hyperventilating boyfriend with as much calmness and levelheadedness as he could muster. “You don’t mean that,” he said, slowly, clearly, but in almost a whisper. “Dan, you don’t mean that. I know sometimes it hits you out of nowhere--I understand that--but you can’t make split-second decisions and throw everything out the window because of how you feel right now, in this moment.”

 

At that, Dan extricated his hands from Blake’s and let them fall to his sides. He finally broke his silence at that point to face Blake and speak aloud. “It’s not how I feel right now. It’s how I feel all the time.”

 

Blake squinted back into Dan’s brown eyes for three, four, six seconds, before ripping his gaze away and shoving his own hands into his pockets. “Then if that’s how you feel…”

 

 _I love you_ , Dan signed. There was no way he could possibly make things better now, but he had to try. _Blake. I love you. But I fucked up._

 

“You didn’t fuck up. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Dan. How did you fuck up?”

 

Oh, God. How did Dan even begin to explain? How could he look at his boyfriend in his eyes, the one who kissed him in the morning and embraced him at night and smoothed the sweat from his brow, the one who pulled him from the edge of the bridge, and say that he had another savior? How did he say that he loved another?

 

Fuck. No. He couldn’t love Phil.

 

Loving Phil ruined everything.

 

“Dan, please. Talk to me.”

 

Dan shook his head. He couldn’t talk, not even if he tried. His voice was caught somewhere between immeasurable guilt and unfathomable sadness, and neither of those two things had ever been much good at helping him pretend everything was fine. He moved then to grab his jacket off the sofa.

 

Blake’s fingers on his wrist halted him. _Dan_ , he signed. _Don’t go. Don’t go out._

 

Dan tried to wrestle his arm from Blake’s grasp, but it was no use. He was just as weak as the feeling in his knees. 

 

 _I would never forgive myself if you walked out that door and left forever,_ said Blake.

 

Dan shot him a mystified look. _I wouldn’t walk out on you like that._

 

 _You know what I mean, Dan._ “Tell me what’s going through your mind,” Blake begged. “I need to know you’re not imagining the bridge again.”

 

Dan no longer knew how to breathe. He didn’t even know where to begin to figure out what was going through his mind. Maybe he was envisioning the bridge, the soft pelting of the rain on his skin in the glow of that eerie street lamp, and maybe he was not. There was something too alluring about the memory all of a sudden--its pain and its numbness--that made it impossible for him to tell Blake that he wasn’t reconsidering it.

 

Fine. I’ll stay, he signed, defeated. He let his jacket fall back onto the couch and ambled stiffly down the hallway to the bathroom, where he hoped to lock himself in for eternity.

 

~

 

The hardest part of crying is trying to stop once you’ve started. Phil knew this. He also knew that once he started this bad habit of getting drunk alone in his hotel room, it would also be difficult to stop. He’d never really been much of a drinker, but he had never quite forgotten that one year in university when things had gotten cloudy and he’d spent the majority of his days with a bottle in the safety of his dorm room.

 

The fact was, it was high noon and Phil was nearly drunk. Granted, he had actually managed to get himself out of his hotel room and make it downstairs to the lobby, but he’d stopped at the bar there and hadn’t left since. 

 

He was due for a meeting in two hours to discuss the next segment of filming for the movie. Since this last phase of the plot was set in LA, he had decided to stay the extra night over in the city after VidCon and just wait for the rest of his crew to fly down from Seattle. At this moment, however, filming and discussing plot points and having to laugh at other people’s jokes were the furthest thing from his mind.

 

The buzz of his phone jolted him from his stupor. It was lighting up and vibrating against the countertop, and it took Phil almost a full minute to recognize the number.

 

Dan.

 

He had texted Dan last night, but refrained from calling him again. He’d thought everything was over for good this time.

 

Why was he calling Phil now?

 

He should pick up. He knew he should. Hell, every fiber in his being was screaming at him to pick it up. He had to know that Dan was still safe and alive--that was just how Phil was. But the alcohol also made Phil’s vision go dark sometimes, and sometimes it made him not care. He let it ring four more times without lifting his hand to touch the phone, and then it went to voicemail and the screen fell black again.

 

~

 

The next sixty minutes of Dan’s life were the most memorable blur yet.

 

His phone was balanced against the rim of the sink. He watched the pattern of the ringing telephone symbol on the screen as he called Phil, once, then twice, and then nearly a third time--but he stopped himself in time. If Phil Lester didn’t want to talk to him anymore, he had more than enough reason. Dan didn’t even know anymore what had made him dial Phil.

 

The sting of the needle was almost comforting then against his skin. He always closed his eyes and leaned back a little when he was shooting up; as he did so this time in the tiny bathroom, Dan tried to imagine a great expanse of nothingness, of swirling black and white behind his eyelids. Not even a snapshot of the bridge; just nothingness. He welcomed the high of being numb.

 

It made everything almost seem okay.

 

Some time later, he finally straightened himself and studied his reflection in the mirror. In the haze of his pumped up mind, he seemed to almost be smiling in the glass. He scooped up his paraphernalia and stashed them again behind the soap bars in the soap cabinet, then turned on his heel, flicked off the light, and unlocked the bathroom door. He would apologize to Blake now and put on a movie, maybe, or cook something special, just--just grasp at any shred of normalcy again. Blake deserved none of this.

 

But it was too late for any of that. When he wandered into the kitchen a minute later, Blake was already standing there in the middle of the tiled floor, dustpan in one hand and something small and silver in the other.

 

 _Sorry I made you clean up all my shit,_ Dan signed. _I didn’t mean to break down on you. It isn’t fair--_

 

“Dan, what is this?”

 

Dan paused. His eyes flicked downward to study more closely what Blake was holding out toward him. Suddenly, like a punch to the gut, he stopped breathing as if the wind had been knocked out of him: it was a tiny, jagged square of foil, dotted with traces of snowy white powder in the crinkles.

 

The next thing Dan remembered doing was out of pure instinct: he lunged forward, hands out to grab Blake’s face, and kissed his boyfriend hungrily, desperately, brokenly.

 

Another second passed, and Blake shoved him backward. “No! Dan!”

 

_I’m sorry._

 

“Is this what I think it is?”

 

Dan didn’t dare nod yes or shake his head no. But his silence was more than enough of an answer for Blake, because the next thing he knew, he was reeling back from the blinding white of the slap to his face.

 

Everything from there was a medley of visual noise and a roaring ache in his ears. Blake was screaming something--it seemed like “sorry” from the shape of his lips--but Dan had no more control over his own body. He stumbled to the door, one hand against his throbbing cheek and the other groping blindly for the knob. 

 

The next moment, he was running, thunder racing through his veins and numbness pricking his feet. 

 

He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t care. The last thing he remembered was reaching up to card his free hand through his sweaty hair, and lifting his gaze to the other side of the intersection, and suddenly jerking to a halt because of the sheer beauty and pain of the familiar pale face across the street from him. It was the unmistakable black hair and cerulean eyes and plaid flannel shirt, and the same sad and lopsided smile, it was the skinny shoulders and high cheekbones that he would know anywhere.

 

The vision of Phil Lester snapped his head in Dan’s direction and they made eye contact. Phil’s lips moved, his face contorted in an unrecognizable shock of terror--

 

A silent screech of tires, then Dan whipped his head back to glimpse the last snapshot of a panicked woman behind the wheel, the very last thing he would ever see before he fell to the crumbling asphalt and remembered nothing else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: ...I'm sorry? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	11. Chapter 11

Everyone seemed to be screaming. That was the first thought that flooded Phil’s consciousness, three million different permutations of it, as if his mind had been smashed into smithereens and every single particle had flown into the air of its own accord. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even speak -- no, wait. It was him who had been screaming all along.

Phil didn’t even think he could stop, until he ran out of breath and the hoarse shriek died on his lips. Another woman was shouting while a man across the road bellowed at someone with a cell phone to call 911, for God’s sake.

 _It’s 999_ , Phil thought numbly. _That’s the wrong number. You have to call 999._

“I’m sorry! I’m so -- I didn’t see him -- I must have been going too fast -- ” Some young woman with a frazzled bun was accosting him, her lips pale and her eyes wild, and it took just another second for Phil to somehow remember that he saw her alight moments ago from the car that hit Dan.

_Dan._

That thought alone jolted him back to life. “Dan! No!” he screamed again, and this time he launched himself at the lower half of the black jean-clad body still sticking out at wrong angles from behind the wheel of the Prius.

“Dan, you’re gonna be okay. You have to be okay. You just hit your head, all right? Someone’s calling help. Keep breathing, Dan. I’m right here. I won’t go anywhere. Keep breathing, okay? Christ -- I shouldn’t have gone -- ”

His endless babble seemed to be nonsensical even to his own ears. There was blood -- so, so much blood. It was like food coloring they used to use every Halloween when Dan liked to dress up as a vampire or a zombie, it occurred to Phil dimly, but darker. And thicker. And steaming hot in the crevices between his fingers.

“Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to step away so the paramedics can access the man.”

Phil didn’t respond. Instead, he grabbed at Dan’s cheek, as if by slapping him he would suddenly open his eyes and jump up with a cackle and shout “Surprise! Got you!” But Dan’s fringe only flopped limply against his already ashen brow and when Phil pulled away his hand, there was nothing but more blood in the shape of his own handprint.

“Do something!” he shrieked.

“Sir, please step aside. If you need medical attention, there is another paramedic who can -- ”

“He’s not breathing! Can’t you see he’s not breathing? Why is he that color? Do something, please!”

The next thing Phil knew, a skinny young paramedic, his own eyes almost as wide as Phil’s, was tugging him gently but insistently to his feet. Phil stumbled backwards, missing the edge of the curb, and sagged against the paramedic’s arms.

“Sir, are you hurt anywhere?” the young man asked him.

Phil didn’t answer, just stared down in a daze at the crimson coating his right hand. There was even more of it on his shirt, he slowly came to realize. That was where the young paramedic’s gaze was directed.

“He’s going to be all right,” Phil mumbled woodenly.

“What’s that, sir?”

“He’s going to be all right. He has to. He’s...he’s never not been.”

The paramedic looked so terribly sympathetic that Phil thought he was going to cry, and he himself nearly wanted to laugh out loud at that.

“Sir, do you have any scrapes or injuries anywhere?” the young man pressed again, to which Phil finally shook his head.

“You should go,” Phil muttered. “He needs you. He -- ” His breath hitched in his throat. “He needs me. I should be there…”

That was the last thing he remembered, before the piercing ring of his own screaming vibrated in his ears and then darkness suddenly and mercifully swallowed him.

~

Phil awoke groggily to the sensation of a stiffly folded blanket being draped at an awkward angle around his shoulders. Something cold and unyielding was supporting him in a perpendicular sitting position. After lazily tugging his gaze around the scene, he slowly came into the realization that he was perched on the edge of the curb with his back against the cool, damp metal of a fire hydrant, and he was staring straight into the open back of the ambulance as if it were the maw of an antiseptic beast.

He could just make out the outline of the toes on Dan’s trainers peeking out from under the coverings and straps that kept him steady on the gurney. He didn’t dare try to look any further than that.

“Oh, you’re awake! Steady now, don’t move too much.” It was the young paramedic again, zipping up his supply bag swiftly while giving Phil a cursory glance. “Do you feel dizzy anywhere? Any pain? Thirsty?”

“Dizzy, a little, yeah,” Phil rasped out.

“Stand up slowly, then. No sudden movements. D’you reckon you’d like to be treated at the hospital?”

“Um...for what? I don’t think so, no.”

The young man lifted a brow but did not push the subject. “Well, assuming you’re family, you’re welcome to ride in the ambulance to the ER.”

“Not family. Uh, his -- I’m his boyfriend.” The words simply spilled out of Phil and afterwards he could never tell why.

The horror that exploded in Phil’s chest at the sight of Dan’s wan face and ashen lips was enough to freeze him in his tracks as he sank onto the nearest seat inside the ambulance, but he couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away. Something like moisture began to blur his vision. The bustle of bodies and voices were falling silent inside their incarcerated space, and the beeping of monitors and the gasp of the tube being thrust into Dan’s arms faded away into a low hum, a hellish monotone that kept Phil just below the surface of reality and held him there under the water, unable to escape back into the darkness yet incapable of springing to his feet and declaring it all a nightmare.

Hours later felt like mere minutes. Phil flickered back and forth between full consciousness and automated motion as he paced to and fro in the waiting room, where the wheezing coughs of other patients and the muffled sobs of their friends and family suddenly meant nothing and everything to him. It seemed like decades ago when he’d brought Dan to A&E for the strange stomach upset that they later vlogged about. But this was different, so incomprehensibly different, and Phil was starting to believe he knew why. 

Whenever Phil had chanced upon Dan inert in the throes of an existential crisis on his favorite patch of carpet, he had always been lying face down. Phil had never seen Dan unresponsive with his face to the sky. Dan would not have allowed him to see that. And each time Phil found Dan with his face against the floor, overcast by shadows, they always found a way to get through it, and Dan always somehow made it out okay.

But this time was different. Despite his best efforts, Phil could not writhe free of that ghastly image of Dan’s colorless face and his half-lidded, glassy gaze, bloodless lips covered with an oxygen mask. This time, Dan was not there to say everything would eventually be okay.

This time, Phil was terrified.

~

_“Dan! I’ve got a surprise for you! And you can’t tell me to save my cheesiness for later because I’ve already bought it and kind of opened it so we’re going to have to share it when -- oh, God.”_

_Phil dropped the fresh box of Maltesers on the carpet, along with the rest of the bagged groceries, at the sight of his best friend’s form lying motionless across the space at the foot of the staircase._

_“Mm...not feeling...hungry,” was Dan’s barely intelligible mutter of a reply._

_“Daaan…”_

_The latter made no sign of having heard Phil’s half-chiding, half-worried whine behind him, but he could sense the rustle in Phil’s movements as he bent down to set the milk carton aright and then arranged himself in a more comfortable crouching position near Dan’s head. A few seconds later, Dan felt the soothing stroke of Phil’s long fingers tentatively running across his hair._

_“Would you like to take this upstairs and we could maybe have a semi-decent talk about it over some hot chocolate?”_

_Dan wiggled part of his body in a response to the negative._

_“All right then.” Phil’s stroking ceased momentarily, at which Dan made a gurgling sound of protest until the fingers returned to the back of his hair. Phil cleared his throat, casting about for what to say. “Do you, er, know what triggered it?”_

_Dan did his best impression of a lying-down shrug._

_“Oh, c’mon, Dan, you know not saying anything about it doesn’t really help you.”_

_The sound of that brought a sudden and unbidden smile of bittersweet irony to Dan’s lips, and he lifted his head just a little to whisper: “I’ll be just fine if you keep rubbing my head like that, thanks.”_

_“Dan! You’re not a horse.”_

_“Neighhhhhh.”_

_“Oh, shut it.”_

_“I thought you wanted me to talk, Phil,” mumbled Dan. “Make up your bloody mind.”_

_“Fine. Talk, then. But you have to sit up so I can actually hear what you’re saying.”_

_“If I sit up at a marginally better angle, will you keep patting my head like that?”_

_“...Maybe.”_

_“Deal.”_

_After one more moment of hesitation, Dan slithered into a semi-upright position and maneuvered his lower half until he was resting against the wall in a similar manner to Phil. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and simply allowed the quiet pleasure of Phil’s fingers in his hair to linger. Then he rolled his head closer and began to speak._

_“I’m really jealous of you, Phil.”_

_“W-wait. What?”_

_“No, I am. You have so much...calm about you, but sunshine too, if ever there could be one person who could embody those two things at the same time. You’re so balanced, I guess, is what I’m aiming to say. And not without good reason. You take after your parents. Everyone in your family seems well-balanced. Well-balanced and...kind and...supportive, I suppose is the best word.”_

_Oh, dear. Phil had it figured out now, where all this might be coming from._

_“Friends are weird, y’know?” said Dan. “There’s this thing on Tumblr going around -- ”_

_“I know,” said Phil. “‘You choose a human you like and decide to do stuff with them,’ or something like that.”_

_“Exactly. Weird, right?”_

_“I don’t know,” Phil hedged, unsure now of where this conversation was going. “I think friends are pretty cool. Life would be pretty difficult without having a few by your side.”_

_“Or even just one,” Dan responded contemplatively. He glanced sideways a moment at Phil, and their eyes tangled briefly with each other, before Dan easily slid his gaze back toward the wall in front of them. Phil was left to admire the slope of his nose from his profile view. Dan went on: “But that’s just it. When you have a friend, you choose that particular human you like. Sometimes you don’t even get the chance to find one you really love spending time with. But every human is born with at least one or two other humans already promised to stay with them in their lives. Those two other humans are destined to love you, no matter what, even if you don’t find that other special human you can call your best friend. It’s just what the universe is supposed to do.”_

_Phil counted three heartbeats before he replied: “Your parents love you, Dan.”_

_“Maybe because nature forces them to. Or society. I don’t fucking know which one.”_

_“Dan -- ”_

_“It’s okay, Phil. I just get like this sometimes. You know I’ll be okay.” Of an impulse, Dan laid his head to the side until it made contact with Phil’s shoulder, and then slid a lower until he was pressed up against Phil’s chest and he could feel the thud of each beat of his heart. Phil suddenly felt the air thicken and he had difficulty breathing steadily. He dared not move._

_“I want you to be okay...right now,” Phil choked out. He knew he wasn’t making much sense at the moment._

_But Dan understood. “I know. So do I.”_

_Phil felt the sudden boldness then to lay a hand against Dan’s cheek and tilt his head up a little so their gazes could meet. “Hey,” he whispered. “You know you’re that lucky human I choose to do loads of stuff with, right?”_

_Dan chuckled, a throaty, uneasy laugh that rumbled through his chest and onto Phil’s lap where their bodies made contact. “I know. Even though I kind of stalked you into doing it.”_

_“To be fair, don’t forget that I did my own share of stalking too.”_

_“Well, you learn from the best. I love you, y’know.”_

_Phil’s throat seized up. He barely managed a hoarse reply. “Yeah. I -- you know I do too.”_

_Almost nothing in Phil’s life had ever been certain -- he was the epitome of the unpredictable -- but it was at that precise fraction of a second that the very basis of anything certain left in his existence seemed to crumble beneath him, and he felt himself hurtling headfirst into a vertiginous realm of the unknown. What was love? What did Dan mean by love? What did either of them know about love or about what the other thought love was? Phil almost dared to hope that Dan meant something else, something more, with those three words, but the other part of him that thought he knew Dan best told him that Dan had already defined their relationship for him: friends. Two humans who liked doing things together. Nothing less, nothing more._

_Still, there was nothing Phil could do to stop the wild and uncontrollable drumbeat in his chest._

_As slowly as he dared, Phil felt himself lowering his head, locking eyes with Dan, curling his fingers in the younger boy’s messy locks, until they could both nearly feel each other’s breath on their pulsing skin --_

_And then Dan flew to his feet, knocking skulls clumsily with Phil and yelping out a curse as he did so. “Jesus, the Maltesers are going to waste here on the carpet! Let’s get this shit into the kitchen and have a proper cup of chocolate. I picked out a new anime you might like.”_

~

Others might have vehemently disagreed with Phil, but waiting for Dan to be wheeled out of surgery was every bit as excruciating as the two milliseconds before the almost-kiss with his best friend in the world. For more than five hours Phil agonized in the waiting room, and when Dan was finally released into the intensive care unit, he was not informed until another hour later because he had passed out from sheer exhaustion across two of the plastic chairs.

A red-haired nurse with a fair array of crow’s feet and smile lines was kind enough to shake him awake. “You’re here for Mr. Howell, correct? He’s just been released to the ICU, if you’d like to go see him now. He won’t be awake but you can stay as long as you like.”

“How is he?” Phil blurted, bolting to his feet. “He’s gonna be okay, right? He’s going to be all right?”

“Yes,” said the nurse cautiously. She glanced at the clipboard in her hands. “The exact nature of his condition is protected by HIPAA laws, but I know you must be dying to know something. He will be all right. What I can tell you is that he just barely survived the blood loss in surgery. There were numerous complications to his internal organs but he pulled through. He is a tough one, even for his age.”

Phil managed half a smile. “I know he is. How long before he wakes up?”

“He’s on quite a lot of powerful morphine, hon, so I can’t give you a real time. It may take overnight and even some of tomorrow before he regains consciousness.”

“That’s okay, can you just tell me what room he’s in?”

The nurse eagerly obliged, and then stopped him with a gentle but firm hand on his arm. “The cafeteria is down that hall the other way and to the left. You look like you haven’t eaten in a week, dear. Don’t worry, he’ll still be there when you come up.”

Reluctantly, Phil followed the direction she was pointing in and grabbed the nearest thing he could find -- a tasteless yogurt from a noisy miniature refrigerator -- and paid without collecting his change. Then he stumbled back toward the elevator, smearing the sleep impatiently from his eyes, and jiggled the button for the third floor.

Dan seemed marginally better. At least there were no more matted black clothes stained with clumps of blood underneath the blankets, as far as Phil could tell. He pulled up the solitary chair closer to the massive gray plastic hospital bed and tentatively reached for Dan’s left hand, the one that was not riddled with tubes and tape and fresh pinpricks from needles.

“I always promised I’d be there for you,” Phil whispered. “And the one time it would have counted, I broke my promise. I don’t know how you’ll forgive me.”

Dan made no indication of having heard. His chest rose and fell in shallow, even breaths, and his lashes gave an infinitesimal flicker, but nothing else changed. His unruly hair, curly and unshorn, fell in sweaty strands across his brow. Phil resisted the urge to smooth it away, for fear of feeling nothing but cold skin beneath his fingers.

“I could have lost you. You know that. Don’t you ever, ever do that to me again, okay?”

More minutes passed, counted out by the ticking of the wall clock, before Phil thought of more things to say. “I’ve never screamed like that before in my life. I thought I was the scaredest I could ever be when I thought I was going to fall hundreds of feet off that ride. But I was wrong. I didn’t know what to think, Dan. One second you were there in front of me about to say my name, and I could almost see you starting to smile, and the next you were gone. It was all -- blood and pavement and -- screaming -- that was sheer terror. I’ve never felt that before in my life. Because even though I know we’ve been separated by an ocean for three years now, Dan, you’ve never truly been lost to me. But if...but if I’d actually lost you at that moment, Dan, at that very second, I don’t know what I’d do anymore. What life would mean for me. You’ve always been in it, in some form or another. My life gained purpose the day we met. If I were to lose you, Dan, I would die. It would be literally the most petrifying day of my existence.”

Phil rambled on and on for what could have been hours, though at some point he felt his own voice drift off into silence while his body slowly yielded to the exhaustion of the day. Once or twice in the night he could have sworn he felt the presence of a nurse entering and exiting the room; the third time there was a hand laid on his shoulder as if meant to shake him awake, but then it drew back just as suddenly, and he could just make out the shuffle of the nurse’s footsteps around the bed to check on the IV fluids instead. “Must be uncomfortable sleeping in a chair. The guy really loves him, I’ll give him that,” she murmured.

Day was dawning when Phil finally regained full consciousness. Every muscle in his body ached -- even muscles he never knew he possessed -- but he chastised himself internally for the complaint, considering that Dan had been to literal hell and back and still hadn’t awakened. As Phil went to stretch, he felt something tugging at his hand and realized with a start that his fingers had been intertwined with Dan’s the whole night through. Very gently, at the pace of a snail, he disentangled himself from Dan’s grip and stood up to try to close the blinds. His stomach growled restlessly.

“Ah, good morning!” came a chipper voice from the doorway. It belonged to a rather tall female nurse, about his age and with the same shade of jet black hair but matched with coffee-toned skin. “Just caught you awake at the end of my shift. I was in and out a couple of times last night, so I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

Phil shook his head mutely.

“That’s good. To be perfectly honest, visiting hours ended at 6 p.m., but I thought you were so exhausted and probably would’ve fought me tooth and nail if I pulled you away from your boyfriend there.”

Phil was, in fact, too tired to correct her, but he found himself nodding. “Er...thanks. Any change? Will I see Dan awake sometime today?”

“I can’t say, but likely you will. His fluids are fine and the next nurse on duty will be here to administer more morphine as needed. I must be going, but it was nice meeting you! I’m Penny, by the way. Don’t you worry. Mr. Howell’s a tough one. He’ll pull through in no time. Oh, excuse me!”

There was more shuffling in the corner of Phil’s eye. When he finally registered who was the owner of the shock of blonde hair and blue eyes in the doorway, he froze.

“Blake?”

“What the -- Mr. Lester? What are you doing -- ma’am, hold up!” Blake seized the sleeve of Penny’s uniform in desperation. “Who’s in charge here? How long was Dan in the hospital? Why didn’t I ever receive a call?”

“I’m so sorry! Are you his family?”

“I’m the first in his list of emergency contacts. I’m his boyfriend.”

Penny’s eyes screwed into slits for several seconds as she glanced back and forth between Phil and the newcomer Blake. “I apologize,” she said slowly. “I wasn’t aware… The ER staff said Mr. Lester here was clear to stay because he was Mr. Howell’s confirmed significant other.”

Phil’s head was reeling. “I’m not -- ”

“But you…” Penny faltered.

“The paramedics assumed,” was the best Phil could manage. “Blake, look, I’m so sorry -- I had no clue -- if I’d known then I would have rung you as soon as it happened.”

Blake was chomping down on his bottom lip as if it was the last shred of sanity he could hold on to. Phil didn’t fail to notice the trembling of his fingers as he combed through the tangles in his hair. “I’m just -- wow -- didn’t expect to see you here...it’s all a bit much -- ”

“I know,” said Phil. And before he knew what was happening, he found himself striding forward two paces to drape an awkward arm around Blake’s quaking shoulders. It was all beginning to be very surreal, even more so than the day before, if it were even possible.

“Is he -- is Dan...I mean…”

“Shh. I’ve been here most of the night and Dan seems to be okay. He came out of surgery and just made it, so he’s going to be okay.” Jesus, in all his life Phil had never imagined this moment, just hours after nearly losing his best friend in the world, having to comfort Dan’s _boyfriend_ in his arms as a nurse hovered behind them and the stench of hospital chemicals surrounded them.

A sudden movement from the bed made them both whip their heads toward the body lying there. There was a silent beat, and then Dan’s raspy voice, muffled by the tube.

“Ph-Phil?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: So,,,, I’m sorry for kind of dropping off the face of the earth for the past two-ish months. I won’t bore you with the details, but lots of drama and family tragedy were mostly to blame for the disappearance. The one thing that has sustained me the most is being able to regularly watch new videos from Dan and Phil and seeing the sunshine in their faces whenever I needed to visit their channels for a cheerer-upper. I feel beyond guilty right now for inadvertently choosing the worst point possible to leave you guys on a cliffhanger, so I’m really going to try my best to make it up to you by posting more frequent updates of the succeeding hospital scenes. If you’ve still been reading up to here, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for sticking with the story so far! You guys make my life worthwhile <3


	12. Chapter 12

Phil thought he would be the quickest to spring into action at the sound of Dan’s gasping voice after having just witnessed his best friend go all the way to hell and back, but somehow the nurse Penny still beat him to it. 

“Just a gurgle on the tube,” she sighed, looking nearly as disappointed as Phil himself felt. “Sometimes it happens. A false alarm. But there’s nothing to be concerned about yet--it’s all very normal for a patient to sometimes show pseudo-signs of waking up during this process. He’ll still be unresponsive for some time, I expect. Give it at least another full day or two.”

“Are you sure he’s okay?” said Blake. His hand was visibly shaking as he raised it to his head in a poor imitation of combing through his hair, almost as if he didn’t know what to hold on to.

“Positive, sir,” Penny chirped. “His vitals are looking normal. Don’t you worry, we’ll all be keeping a close eye on him here in the unit. Now...if you’ll excuse me...my shift ended a few minutes ago. Quinn will be right up in no time to take my place and to check on Mr. Howell.”

“I could’ve sworn he spoke my name,” Blake muttered, eyes still trained on Penny’s back as she retreated down the hallway.

 _Same here_ , Phil nearly said, before biting it back against his tongue. He almost tasted blood with the effort to stave the sudden urge to cry.

Blake glanced up at him just in time to see Phil discreetly rub his left eye. “How long have you been here, Mr. Lester?”

“Um…” Phil’s voice emerged scratchier than he would have expected. He winced. “Since the accident.”

“Wait--so what exactly _happened_?”

“I don’t even know. One minute he was in front of me and then the next this woman was coming barreling down the alley out of _nowhere_ and Dan was gone--”

“What do you mean he was ‘in front of you’?”

Phil’s breath shuddered. His ribs ached. “ _I don’t know_. It just happened. We weren’t even--supposed to be on the same continent.”

A sniffle from Blake, and Phil’s attention was arrested. The smaller blonde man was suppressing a waterfall of moisture of his own.

“I can’t,” whispered Blake. “I can’t--this was all my fault. If I hadn’t yelled at him when I found out--he was running away from me--this is...if he doesn’t pull through this by _God_ I swear I will never forgive myself as long as I live…”

Phil stopped him with a soft palm on his shoulder. “Hey. It’s all right. Everything will be okay. The nurse said so, and I doubt she’d lie about something like this just to make us feel better. Dan is...strong. He’ll get through this, trust me.”

“I have so many questions right now and I don’t know where to start,” Blake choked out.

“Why don’t we sit down somewhere and process this together? Have you eaten yet?”

A mute shake of the head.

“Come with me.” The gesture felt foreign to him--after all, Phil was anything but a socially confident person who initiated any physical contact with others, much less in a high-stress situation--but somehow he felt compelled to keep his hands planted on Blake’s shoulders and steer him gently in the right direction toward the nearby cafeteria. Though Blake’s hesitation and agitated gait told him he was dying to sit Dan’s side and wait for him to wake up, Phil knew that staying too long inside that suffocating room that smelled like antibiotics and masked death would drive them both insane.

“Have they got the lunatic who did this to Dan?” was the first thought that Blake blurted out, as soon as they had settled at an isolated little table with their trays of hospital food and had had enough of sidestepping the awkward silence.

Phil glanced down into his coffee cup. “I don’t know. It wasn’t a hit-and-run, exactly. Last thing I saw she was talking to the paramedics. Quite hysterically, actually--”

“I’m sorry, but, how _exactly_ do you know Dan?”

Here goes nothing, Phil thought. He drew a big gulp of his coffee without bothering to pour sugar into it.

“Ex-flatmate?” Phil said, pitch unusually high and inquiring. He immediately hated his brain’s reflexive use of ‘ex.’

Blake’s crystal eyes bored into Phil’s for an interminable second before he withdrew his gaze and started pushing the fries around on his plate. There was a nearly inaudible “Ah.”

“What about you? How did you--”

Blake cut him off. “Dan never mentioned you.”

“I figured as much,” Phil replied without missing a beat. What was this sudden pain blossoming inside his chest? With affected nonchalance he tapped his now half-drained coffee cup against the edge of the table. Despite it all, he felt a compulsion to defend Dan. “I, er, you could say we didn’t part on very good terms. My fault mostly, I have to think.”

There was no missing the way the muscles between Blake’s shoulder blades stiffened, even in Phil’s half-dazed, sleep-deprived state. Something around Blake’s eyes twitched.

“Anyway,” Phil spoke again, quietly this time, as if to gently guide the other man back to the original thread of the conversation. “I can’t imagine what you must be feeling. If I’d known you were the contact person…”

“Yeah, well, everybody seems to assume you were the partner.” Blake sounded oddly strangled, though just as quiet.

Phil twisted his mouth wryly. “No idea why they would think that. I can’t have been freaking out that much.”

“Ugh...if there’s one thing I’m happy about not having to see it would have been the blood. Still...if I’d been there…”

“Blaming yourself won’t help,” Phil said, somewhat hypocritically, he thought. “It all happened so fast. It would have been inhumanly impossible to...you know.”

“He’ll be okay, right? He’ll be okay.”

“Both the doctor and the nurse said so.”

“He’s got to be okay,” Blake muttered on. “He’s never _not_ been.”

Phil’s chest constricted. He knew all too well that exact sentiment.

“I swear I will kill him if he doesn’t get through this. He’s gotten through much, much worse.”

Phil bit down reflexively on the lip of his coffee cup. “Worse?” he murmured around the bitter liquid sloshing inside his mouth.

Blake rapped his nails against the table and toyed with his rumpled napkin before pushing it away in a semi-dismissive gesture. “Not...really...in the right place to talk about it.”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

“Not your fault. Dan’s always had it rough from the start, but sometimes I just wonder where all this bad luck comes from. How many times does he have to almost _die_?” Blake’s voice cracked on his last word, and with it Phil felt his own heart splinter a little more.

“I’m sorry,” he offered again, feeling powerless and like utter garbage.

There was a long stretch of silence that turned into an uneasy rhythm of chewing, nails tapping and shoe soles squeaking. 

Phil attempted one more time to salvage what was left of the conversation. “Tell me about a good memory, then. Something happy. It’ll calm the nerves, I promise. Maybe the time you and Dan met?”

“Wasn’t exactly a conventional sort of meeting.” There was a bitter sort of irony to Blake’s voice that left Phil nonplussed. “Ran into each other on the Vincent Thomas Bridge one evening.”

The confusion started to leave Phil. “Strangers in the night?” he tried to chuckle.

Unsurprisingly, Blake didn’t laugh along with him. “There’ve been good times, too,” he said instead, still keeping his eyes trained on the half-eaten sandwich on his tray. “God, his laugh. I live for that. It’s like fucking rain in the desert when I hear it.”

Phil knew.

“And taking him out to new places. God. He’s like a little kid when his eyes go wide like that.”

How could Phil forget?

“I miss him,” Blake whispered, and something in the way he uttered those three words told Phil there was a sentiment far, far deeper behind them. “I really do. I miss him so fucking much.”

“I know,” Phil whispered back.

Blake leaned his elbows on the edge of the table then and let his head rest cradled in his arms. He lifted his gaze back to Phil’s for the first time in a while and cast him something in between a grimace and a smile. “I bet you miss him too.”

Phil would never know afterward why he suddenly became so honest in that moment. “You have no idea.”

“Huh. How long were you two roommates?”

The question startled the tears into Phil’s eyes. Quickly he shifted sideways to lean against the wall so he could turn his head into the shadows and hide the moisture behind his lids. “Eight years.”

“Eight? Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“Eight.” Blake was intelligent in his own right, this much Phil knew. He also knew there was too much understanding in the sound of Blake’s reply to allow himself to think he hadn’t said too much.

Blake picked up his sandwich again and turned it over in his hand, as if at that precise moment he had just come to some secret conclusion within himself. After picking through the tomatoes, he said: “Funny as hell how I’d end up working for _you_ , isn’t it?”

As if Phil didn’t already know.

~

Phil had to leave the hospital at some point. Christina had been managing most of the shoots for the past two days, but nothing could move forward completely without his presence and approval. And so, reluctantly, he headed back to the hotel to take a good, long, two-hour shower, change into something that didn’t smell like despair and asphalt and blood, and call up his assistant director to explain himself.

Christina and the rest of the crew, of course, were understanding--so much so to the point that Phil could not escape the burn of sympathy in their eyes every second that they weren’t shooting. He himself was imprisoned in the agony of his own mind and had been hoping to at least return to some semblance of normalcy at work so that he could pretend for a few hours that everything was okay.

At lunch break, Christina cut straight to the chase. “Look,” she said over her ginger ale, “I haven’t gotten a chance to properly tell you how absolutely sorry I am to hear about what you’re going through. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like. Honestly--if you need more time--”

“I’m all right, Christina,” Phil jumped in, before she could say anything else that would send him spiraling further. As it was, it was taking every ounce of Herculean strength inside him to control the tremors running beneath his skin. “This shoot is important and so is this entire project. I won’t abandon it. If anything, it’s helping me deal with things at the moment.”

“I know you want to be with your friend right now…”

“He’ll be there when work is over,” Phil said, not with an unkind smile. “I appreciate the support, I really do. But working today is also another way of coping. So...if you could do me a small favor and maybe tell the others not to stare at me so much? I don’t know, I just...it winds me up knowing that they think they know something.”

“Of course. I’ll make sure nothing gets out.” Christina shot him a friendly smirk. “Coffee run for three days in exchange for my services?”

Phil was so deeply distracted that he answered, perfectly serious, “I’ll make it five.”

Christina chuckled and shook her head. “You’re so precious, Phil. Don’t worry about the coffee. This is the least I can do for you.”

“Thank you, Christina. I mean it.”

~

Blake was slumped in an awkward position in the chair at Dan’s bedside when Phil tiptoed into the hospital room several hours later in the dull halogen glow of the night. He cautiously peeled off his windbreaker and laid it in a bundle on the floor, where the droplets rolled off the nylon into sickly green pools against the strangely lit linoleum.

Phil ran a hand through his damp fringe and plucked up the courage to step closer to the bed. Most of Dan’s body was still concealed by the blanket and his arms were still riddled with needles and tubes. He wasn’t sure what exactly he’d been expecting--miracles never seemed to follow him into hospitals.

He came to a halt at last at the foot of the bed. There was a strip of plastic railing there, and he slowly wrapped his fingers around it, seeking groundedness from its solidity.

“I’m sorry for everything I ever said,” he murmured.

Phil thought he said much more than that, but that was the only line he remembered the next morning when he awoke with a start because of the squeak of a supplies cart from the hallway outside. His gangly body was splayed out on the linoleum with half of his back supported by the side of Dan’s bed; there were jagged patterns of lines where the bedsheet had impressed upon his cheek in the night, and the unmistakable scent of his own drool on his chin.

Phil blinked. There were battered gray trainers in his line of vision. It took a while for him to register them as belonging to Blake, who was standing in front of him with a somewhat amused expression.

“I could have asked the nurse for another chair,” Blake said by way of greeting. His tone sounded almost friendly.

Phil stifled a yawn. “There’s the lounge for guests,” he pointed out. “But I suppose we’re both too stubborn for that.”

“Well, I’m going to go find Penny anyway and ask her for one. I’ll be back.”

In Blake’s absence, Phil blinked again, slowly and deliberately, before climbing to his feet. A wave of dizziness washed over him and he rode it out, eyes closed, before he was able to turn back to Dan. It was a precious opportunity now to be able to be at Dan’s side alone.

Phil could have sworn he saw Dan’s lashes flutter then. The breath caught in his throat. _God, please_ \--

The waking was not gentle and easy. It happened all at once, like a blur in a swirling vortex; one minute Phil was praying to whatever powers may be to let Dan’s eyes open and see him, and the next the monitors were beeping and Dan’s arms and fingers were twitching and his eyelids had snapped open, and his irises were dark and wide and pulsing with abject terror. The feeding tube was still shoved in his throat and Dan began to thrash weakly against the sheets.

Even as Phil heard himself screaming for a nurse, Penny was already rushing inside. Blake followed close at her heels. His shock of platinum hair was standing on end even higher than before.

There was a flurry of disconnecting tubes and needles and reconnecting other ones, and Penny muttering words of comfort to Dan as the other two men stood there in an openmouthed and helpless stupor. Blake was the first to fly to Dan’s side as soon as Penny took a step back. Phil could only stand rooted to the ground as if his body no longer obeyed him.

“Babe. Babe! Dan! It’s me. Shh, it’s just me. Do you see me? Stay with me.” And then Blake started to do something strange with his hands, moving them in a hurried pattern, and there was only another heartbeat of confusion before the realization hit home and the pit of Phil’s stomach plummeted to his toes.

Sign language.

Blake was signing to Dan.

 _His_ Dan.

What the hell? 

Blake continued to sign and speak as his hands moved. Penny watched furtively from a distance, seeming almost entranced, as she attended to the IVs. “Dan? It’s me, Blake. You’re safe. There was an accident, but you’re safe now. You’re in the hospital. You’re going to be okay.”

And then another voice spoke, and it tore straight through Phil’s gut because he knew it belonged to Dan and yet it sounded so different. It bore a strange lilt, a sort of thickness, not quite an accent nor the slur of morphine on his tongue.

“Who...are you?” Dan choked out. “Where’s Phil?”

Phil watched Blake’s stumble backward as if in slow motion. Somehow he knew the man’s hands had to be shaking. They clenched into fists in midair, and then slowly drifted down to his side. Jerkily, Blake looked back over his shoulder and across the room at Phil.

Penny jumped in at that second to pipe up, “Sir, maybe it’s best if I inject a sedative…?”

“No!” Blake said, harshly.

“I can leave you for a minute,” Phil said. He himself was beginning to feel faint. He couldn’t seem to wrap his head around the one discovery that Dan was deaf. Dan was deaf. He had watched with his very own eyes as Dan was run over at an intersection, and yet this one fact made Phil’s world spin in ways that no other news had.

Blake ignored his offer. He turned back to Dan and began to sign and speak again. “I’m Blake. Do you remember me?”

Dan stared up at him with red eyes and cracked lips and dried tears somewhere down those splotchy cheeks. “Blake,” he repeated slowly. “Blake…” And then his gaze seemed to shift into some sort of understanding.

Blake breathed out a sigh that seemed to rise from the depths of his gut. Then he was collapsing into Dan, arms out and stroking and soothing, hugging him close, rocking him back and forth with silent words of comfort. 

Blake. Blake was embracing Phil’s Dan.

Sometime during the exchange Penny had disappeared--probably to hunt up a doctor--and Phil was left alone to grapple with the pangs in his chest.

“I saw Phil,” Dan spoke again. His words were muffled against Blake’s jacket, but for Phil who was hanging on his every sentence, it was loud and clear.

Blake pulled up abruptly. 

Dan repeated, in slow and simple phrases like a child: “I saw Phil. At the road. Phil was there. Before it all went black. Where is he?”

Phil hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until he started counting the seconds during which Blake made no reply or indication of having heard Dan. Blake simply stared at him in what could only be described as disbelief.

Finally, without a word, Blake pivoted on his heel and rushed out into the corridor.

“Blake--wait!” Phil shot Dan an apologetic gesture that he hoped would not make him panic further, and then tore off after Blake. He caught the latter just before the entrance to the elevator.

“Blake! What the heck? What just happened?”

Blake spun around to face him. Though his visage was contorted with something akin to rage, his eyes were awash with pain. 

“Go back to him. He needs you,” Blake said.

“No, he needs _you_. You’re his boyfriend, Blake. You can’t do this to him!”

“Eight years,” Blake spat back. “Eight years, right? That’s pretty goddamn hard to beat.”

“It’s not about--”

“Save it, Lester. I’m obviously not needed here anymore. And don’t look for me at work tomorrow. I’ll e-mail you the resignation.”

“Blake…” But the elevator dinged and the blonde man slipped in before Phil could form a coherent response.

Phil’s thoughts were a muddle, but one thing was clear: he had to head back to Dan. He dashed back into the room without another moment’s hesitation. He had only rounded the doorway when he caught sight of Dan’s disheveled head turned in his direction. The light in Dan’s eyes sparked with a violent joy at his sudden reappearance.

And then Dan began to sob.

“Oh, no, no, don’t cry,” Phil muttered, though he knew by now he wouldn’t be heard. He closed the gap between them in two long strides and engulfed Dan--his warm, trembling, childlike Dan--in his own arms. It all felt so wrong and yet his heart screamed at him to never let go.

“I thought it wasn’t real,” Dan hiccuped. “I swore I saw you. I thought it wasn’t real.”

“Shh.” Phil conveyed his comfort by running his fingers up and down the other’s spine in that pattern he knew would always loosen up Dan. “Shh.”

Dan went on babbling. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about what I said on the phone. Everything hurts… I remember…” A hiccup. “Thought--I’d never--see you again…”

“Well, I’m here now,” Phil replied. He hoped Dan would somehow know his answer and understand.

And then Dan continued to speak and the next thing he said made Phil’s heart thump once and then skip a beat.

“It’s you, Phil. It’s always been you. I’ve always loved you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Eeeek once again this chapter was late. But to make up for it I sort of threw all previous outlines out the window and went with the flow of the drama? Can I get some feedback on the new developments now, pretty please?? :D
> 
> Edit: The trailer I've been secretly working on for this fic is NOW OUT!! Go check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIXHZlAb41I&t=17s and maybe let me know what you think!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: A talk about suicidal thoughts around the middle of the chapter but it's more...objective and not exactly triggering, if that makes sense?

The taste in Dan’s mouth when he awoke could only be described as something akin to cotton doused in gasoline. He was disoriented, floating and spinning at the same time, transfixed by the haphazard patterns of paint drips on the ceiling above him. Slowly, very slowly, the rest of his body began to catch up with his consciousness. Something told him it would be painful beyond necessity for him to move; and so he remained inert with his eyes half-lidded and took it all in: the itchy bandages around his wrists and fingers, the hard and leaden weight wrapped around one of his legs, the strange throbbing in crisscrossed lines across his chest, and above all the wooden sensation that filled his brain and tongue.

Sluggishly, Dan rolled his eyes to the side where he sensed another presence.

Shock—as swiftly as it could in his present state—swelled over his face as he locked gazes with an all too familiar pair of cerulean eyes. Black hair, swept away in a tousle away from the high forehead. Arched brows drawn together in consternation across the pale visage.

Phil.

Phil Lester. Flatmate. Best friend. Betrayed. Loved.

Dan tried to talk, even though he already knew it would be useless. He didn’t need his hearing aids to be able to sense that nothing was coming out of his mouth.

Phil’s lips were moving in what looked half like an apology and half like a cry of joyful desperation. Dan was tired, so tired. So, so tired. He blinked and nearly closed his eyes before he could fully decipher what Phil was saying.

Only seconds passed before a slender nurse came flying in, her black ponytail streaming behind her. Soft hands prodded at his shoulders, coaxed him gradually into a less reclined position. Liquid was raised to his lips. He took a greedy gulp.

Another hand was laid ever so gently against his right arm. Dan stared at it dumbly, wondering how on earth he could possibly still know the web of veins that crisscrossed over that hand, and how he could know that there was a new break in the pattern near the knuckle of the second finger.

Phil lifted Dan’s chin slightly with his finger so that they could make eye contact once more. His irises were shimmering, maybe almost wet, but he seemed to be holding back behind his lips whatever words were dying to tumble out. With his other hand, Phil raised a white index card with his handwriting scrawled across it.

_How are you feeling?_

Dan licked his lips to try to speak again. “Amazing.” All the sarcasm he could muster was suffused into his gravelly tone.

That one word sent the euphoria flooding back into Phil’s eyes. His eyebrows lifted; he grinned and his shoulders trembled in a chuckle of indescribable relief. He grabbed Dan bodily by the torso and engulfed him in as tight an embrace as he could manage.

Dan’s sudden coughing fit broke apart the hug. “What—what happened?”

Phil drew back immediately and shuffled through what was apparently a stack full of pre-written index cards in his hands. He pulled one out.

_There was a car accident. I’m sorry. I didn’t get to you in time._

“So...so you _were_ there. I wasn’t just hallucinating.” Suddenly Dan’s eyes widened. “Who told you I was deaf?”

Amazingly, Phil also had a pre-made index card in answer to that. _I figured there was something up with your hearing because Blake signed with you. I’m going to try to learn sign language as soon as I can. I’m sorry._

Dan stared at him for a moment, expecting the next card to be lifted to have something along the lines of “How did you go deaf?” scrawled across it, but the question never came. The breath of relief left him in a tiny puff. He didn’t know why he had even considered for a second that Phil might ask something like that so soon after his waking up.

Partly out of habit and partly out of some incomprehensible desire to share with Phil another part of him, Dan struggled to raise his left hand with the intention of signing along as he spoke. When he felt nothing at the ends of his fingertips, he glanced down. His left arm lay there limply on his lap, wrapped in a thick cast. He whipped his head back up at Phil, signing clumsily this time with his right hand. “What were you doing back there at the accident?”

“Don’t tire yourself!” Phil exclaimed. He reached forward to grab Dan’s hand and lower it back to his side. His next card read: _I’ve been in LA with my crew for some filming._ And another: _Don’t tire yourself so much. The doctor said you have a broken leg, broken arm and a couple of smashed ribs. Some internal injuries too._

“Phil.” Tears were inexplicably filling Dan’s eyes. Nearly a minute passed before he was able to speak past the sob caught in his throat. “Phil. Why are you--you’re doing all this for me.”

Phil grabbed a marker from his pocket and wrote on a blank side: _What do you mean?_

“Phil, stop writing cards. I can read your lips fine if you speak slowly and face me.”

“Oh.” Phil pocketed the marker again. “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“It’s okay.” A wave of nausea hit him then, but Dan fought the overwhelming urge to lie back and close his eyes again. He never wanted to wake up another day without knowing where Phil was, as long as he could help it. “I didn’t expect you to make a whole dozen flashcards just for this conversation. Jesus Christ.” There it was again, persistent and demanding, the need to cry.

Phil shrugged. “I wanted to make sure we could talk without any misunderstandings. It’s not a big deal. I’d do anything to make you comfortable.”

Even though Phil had unconsciously lowered his head at the tail end of his sentence, Dan was quite certain he knew what Phil had said. A hot flush across Dan’s cheeks colored the silence that ensued.

“So...how are you feeling? Seriously.”

Dan cracked a lopsided smile at that. “You just said, smashed ribs and broken limbs. What do you think?”

“I’m not joking--”

“I’m okay, Phil. I mean it. They must have given me a bucketload of morphine, because I can’t really feel anything below neck level at this point. Though this is still far better than what I was expecting. I thought I was going to be floating somewhere in heaven the next time I woke up again.”

Phil cocked a brow at him, barely able to contain his smirk. “Heaven, huh?”

“Actually shut up.”

“Never.” Phil’s tongue made a brief appearance from between his teeth. “Are you hungry?”

Dan made a face. “Starving, obvs. I guess they couldn’t fit a bunch of meat into the feeding tube.”

“I’ll see the nurse then about having them bring you something solid if the doctor thinks you’re ready.”

“Thanks.” Dan ran his tongue over his upper lip. “How long have I been out?”

Phil glanced at his watch--wait, when had Phil gotten one? “Well, it’s early morning, and judging by the date I’d say about five days.”

“You haven’t been here all that time, have you.” It must have sounded almost like an accusation.

“No!” Phil said quickly. “I mean, not the _whole_ time. I do have a directing job to maintain, you know.”

Dan locked eyes with him then, and the both of them knew that he knew that Phil was mostly lying.

“Floors and chairs are rubbish for sleeping on,” Dan said lightly, after a small pause.

“I know that now.”

“And...and where is--” Oh God, Phil must have discovered at some point that Dan had a boyfriend. He didn’t know exactly why all he felt was dread now. “Where’s Blake?”

Phil’s lips pressed into a thin line. “I’m not really sure.”

So Dan hadn’t hallucinated the memory of Blake hugging him, then. 

“He’ll probably come up when he’s free,” Phil added.

The muscle in Dan’s jaw twitched as he swallowed. Something definitely felt amiss. “Yeah, he’s always had a crazy schedule with the camerawork. He said his director was really kind to him last time, though, when he let him come home from Seattle because of the campus incident--”

“Dan. Dan!” Phil’s eyes were awash with a guilt that Dan could not explain. “Blake works for me. Or...I mean...he _used_ to work for me.”

“W-what?”

“I’m the director that Blake was working for. It’s crazy, I know. Even I had no idea until we met here in the hospital a few days ago.”

“What the hell… Phil, you said he _used_ to work for you. Did you _fire_ him?”

“What? No! I would never do that! Unless he was running around threatening people with knives, maybe. Er...I mean, he resigned.”

Any other day, Dan would have teased Phil relentlessly about the awkward joke, but this time the thumping inside his chest only pushed him to probe further. “But _why_?”

“He...er...how do I say this.” Phil was wincing. “Apparently, he didn’t know you and I were best friends for some time. He...must have felt like there was something more to the story that nobody was willing to share. I guess.”

“What the actual…”

“Look, I tried not to say too much because I didn’t know what you had told him,” Phil hurried on. “And it’s not your fault either. It’s just--the drugs probably made you...say some things that you don’t even remember.”

No, Dan remembered now. He remembered everything. The real question was if Phil remembered, too, and if so, how much--and why he still hadn’t brought any of it up.

Dan knew he should have been brave and owned up to it, but when in his life could he have ever claimed to be courageous? And so in the split second that he lifted his gaze to meet Phil’s and the latter sat waiting for his response, Dan took the other road, the one that had always been easier, shameful but easier, and spoke like the coward he knew he was inside.

“Like...like what?”

Phil was still staring back at Dan, as if struggling to discern if he was truly confused or simply lying. “Nothing bad,” he said slowly. “You just asked him right away where I was. It must have made him think you meant something else.”

Dan waited with bated breath for Phil to continue, but the older man didn’t. He supposed that each of them was just as cowardly as the other.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he replied, and in the few more seconds that their eye contact lingered, both of them knew they were no longer talking about Dan’s words to Blake.

Phil opened his mouth as if to say _I know_ ; but after all, if they both truly understood one another and what they were really talking about, that was not at all the right thing to say. Instead, he expertly danced around the subject. “Don’t think about it too much right now. I’m sure he’ll come up or call you when he’s ready.”

Dan laid his head back down on the pillow at that and rolled his gaze sideways at Phil with a tired sigh. “Probably not if you’re always here.”

“He loves you, Dan.” As he uttered the words, Phil shifted position, tucking his knees up on the chair and bringing his chin down to rest on them. He looked so tired, even more so than Dan felt, he dared imagine. It was the kind of soul-deep tiredness that could not easily be shaken or slept away.

“I know,” Dan said. And once again, he floundered inside his mind, unsure of whether they were still talking about Blake.

At least Phil was kind enough not to ask: _Do you love him?_

~

It was strange to fall asleep and wake up in the hospital. It was a metaphysical space that seemed to hang between wakefulness and dreaming, neither quite one or the other. Sometimes Phil was there in the chair at the bedside when Dan woke up, and sometimes he was not. When he was, he was always either dozing in some contorted position under the shadowy pattern of the blinds, or clicking away quietly at his laptop, or scrolling through something on his phone with his brow furrowed in concentration. Most of the time Dan didn’t dare stir or breathe a word, for fear that this was but a hallucination and speaking would burst the dreamed-up image of his best friend brought back to life. But Dan didn’t have to speak. Phil would almost always look up at the slightest rustle of the bedsheets, cast him a weary smile, and ask him if he was hungry or if he needed anything. 

Blake did, in fact, text Dan some time after that first lengthy conversation with Phil. Dan wasn’t sure just how many hours or days had passed; but he couldn’t deny that some measure of relief washed over him when Phil handed him his phone with the brief explanation that he had a message from his boyfriend.

It wasn’t sweet or apologetic, not even overtly angry, but it was enough to temporarily assuage Dan’s guilt and assure him that not all was lost.

_I’m guessing you’re still in the hospital. You can call me when you’re awake and I can come pick you up._

_Oh wait, nvm. I don’t think you have your aids. Just text me when you’re ready._

Still, the lack of emojis at the end of each text, as well as the impeccable capitalization, told Dan that something had irrevocably shifted between them.

Dan knew he would have to leave the hospital at some point. After all, he hated lying here with nothing to do except watch his IV supply get pumped with more morphine and tangle with his own thoughts. And yet the prospect of facing reality--and continuing that conversation he had cut off with Blake before bolting from the apartment--absolutely terrified him.

Phil’s gentle hand prodded him in the arm. Dan glanced up. “Are you going to text him?” Phil asked.

“Maybe later,” Dan hedged. He tapped at the screen, scrolled through the previous texts, but reading them over too intently was bound to send a twinge through his chest. He tossed the phone away from him instead toward the end of the bed.

“I’m sure the guy’s worried sick about you.”

“Not really sure about that.”

“You should give him more credit, Dan. I saw how he ran to you as soon as he saw you lying there.”

“I know.”

“And he told me before, way back when I didn’t know you were together, he told me how he re-learned sign language with you after you met. That was--”

“I know, Phil. You don’t need to convince me that Blake is a good guy.”

“All right.”

“I just…”

“What? What is it, Dan?”

“I wish it didn’t have to be so complicated.”

“Your relationship?”

“No. I mean _this_. Okay, yeah, maybe my relationship, but also life in general. This. Whatever it is that’s going on with us...or between us.”

“We’re best friends, Dan.”

“Were,” Dan corrected him quietly. “We were. Before I fucked everything up.”

Phil looked like he had to pretend that didn’t hurt. “But you already explained it to me, back when you called me after VidCon. I understand. There’s nothing to feel guilty about.”

“It’s not--”

“I just wish it was something you’d talked to me about much, much sooner,” Phil went on. “Before you even left. Then you wouldn’t have had to suffer this much pain. I could have done something, Dan. Or we could have done something together. We could have gotten help.”

“I really needed to leave anyway,” Dan mumbled. It was only half a lie. “I couldn’t go on filming and being a part of YouTube with--with _this_ going on. It was good, too, to get a new life. Even a new identity.”

“I suppose,” Phil agreed reluctantly. “Did it really help?”

Dan shrugged.

“You need to talk to somebody about this. I mean it. After you get out of the hospital, and as soon as you’ve taken enough time to heal and get back to normal, you can’t just repress this and go on with your life like it never happened. Look, even your relationship might be taking a beating because of this.”

“You don’t know shit about my relationship,” Dan said in an unreadable monotone, but the subtle venom was still there. He winced. “I’m sorry--”

“You’re right. I don’t know shit about it. But I do know that this is unsustainable, Dan. I care about you so much--I always have. And this--I know suicidal thoughts aren’t meant to be dealt with alone.”

“It’s not fair for you.”

“For fuck’s sake, forget what’s fair and what’s not fair for either of us. Look, did you really mean it? When you said it?”

“When I said what?”

“Don’t play dumb, Dan.” Phil carded his hand through his unkempt quiff. “Did you mean it when you said you loved me?”

Dan hadn’t realized he was biting down on his lip until the sting of blood flooded his tongue behind his teeth. After an interminable quiet, he lowered his gaze to his hand in his lap and whispered: “Yeah.”

He couldn’t see Phil’s heavy exhalation, but he felt it. The next thing he knew, Phil was gently lifting his chin with a finger so they were face to face again. “Dan, if you love me, you’ll do this for me.” When Dan began to protest, he tacked on: “If you won’t do it for yourself, then you should at least do it for me. I’ll be with you when the time comes, if that’s what you want. But I’m asking you to get help.”

“Okay,” Dan muttered at last.

Phil closed the gap between them then to hug him, and he hugged him back as best he could with his one working arm, and it all felt so right. Almost as if there weren’t a mountain of things still left unspoken between them.

Phil pulled back far enough so that Dan could read his lips as he asked: “Promise?”

Dan nodded mutely.

They probably would have stayed like that, comfortably inhaling one other’s scent as they sat in each other’s embrace, if not for the sudden reappearance of Penny in the doorway.

“Dr. Litwin is here to see you,” she said loudly, and not without having to hide a tiny smile.

The white-coated man who strolled in after her characterized every stereotype of the aging, fatherly physician with a stern mouth but a twinkle in his eyes. He flipped through some of the rumpled pages of Dan’s chart before addressing him.

“Mr. Howell. Dan, is that correct? Or James?”

“Sir, Dan’s deaf, so you’ll have to look directly at him when you speak.”

Dr. Litwin cocked a brow in Phil’s direction. “Ah. And you must be…?”

Dan could read enough body language to know what was going on. Without thinking, not even allowing himself enough time to panic, he grabbed Phil’s hand and squeezed it. “Phil. He’s family.”

“All righty, then. Would you prefer to be alone as I go over your chart with you, or would you rather Phil stays?”

“He can be here.”

“Of course. So as a quick summary, we operated on you within an hour of the car accident, and managed to extract a fair amount of shrapnel from your chest and abdominal area. As you can see, both your left leg and left arm aren’t feeling too good, either.” The doctor chuckled. “Those may take up to two months to fully heal, and of course, I strongly recommend you do some physical therapy to ensure that the muscles don’t atrophy and you can use both limbs the same way as you did before.

“As for your internal injuries, those were a little more complicated. But you’re a very, very lucky young man, I tell you. Even with the severe blood loss and continued internal bleeding, you still managed to wake up alert and functioning before we expected you to, it seems. I would still get plenty of rest, though, if I were you, and no quick or sudden movements. You did suffer a slight concussion to the side of your head.”

“That would explain why my brain feels like a bowling ball,” Dan deadpanned.

“And the rest of your body?”

“Not as bad.”

“Good, good. The level of painkillers isn’t too high for you?”

Dan shook his head.

“That’s good...er...we were concerned because patients don’t normally have this high a dosage of morphine, but apparently you asked Penny yesterday for more. Which brings me to my next point: we found an unusually high amount of opioid content in your body during surgery. Do you know anything about that, Dan?”

Sweat bloomed unbidden across Dan’s palms. He swallowed. “Opioids? Like painkillers?”

Dr. Litwin nodded.

“Not the ones you injected in me?”

“Oh, no, we used anesthetics for the surgery. I’m referring to opiates, opioids, whichever term you’re familiar with.”

Dan only missed a beat, and then said: “I do take Percocet for my injury.”

“Oh? What kind of injury?”

“Uh...sports-related.”

Phil cocked a brow at Dan, who just gave his hand a savage squeeze and shot him a warning look to tell him _Not now_.

“I see…” Dr. Litwin muttered, and scribbled something at the bottom of the chart. “If you don’t have any questions for me, I’ll be on my way, but I’ll be sending the physical therapist your way to have a chat, okay? And I’ll also call up our rehab liaison too if you have any questions for her. Have a good one.”

Dan was just beginning to release the breath he hadn’t realized was pent up inside him, when Phil squeezed his hand insistently.

“Dan,” said Phil. “Dan, I know you’re tired, but can you look at me? Dan...do we need to talk about this rehab thing?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I’m assuming some of you may not have seen the edit to the note at the end of the last chapter, so I’m reiterating my announcement: the trailer for this fic is NOW UP! Please go check it out on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIXHZlAb41I&t=17s and let me know what you think ;) Also, I’d like to take this opportunity again to officially thank you all again for your faithful reads and thoughtful, insightful comments. A few users without accounts but who’ve been consistently following this fic also deserve a shoutout: fractalgeometry, the first commenter ever; Emma (aka EmmaIsTiredAndThisFicIsAmazing); and Lauren--as well as ao3 users Viviana_Di_Chiara, Jullielicious, Smiledonce, obv10usly, AmazingStuckyIsNotOnFire, and combatbootsandflowercrowns (who legit made me sob like four separate times). And for those who are quietly reading each update and simply smiling/crying (hey, I never know which!), you will never know how much I appreciate your reads and support. ^_^  
> One last point that may not be so related but I feel excited to share with you anyway...is that I recently cut my hair. As in, major tress chop (almost 6 inches). It’s still not as short as I would like it, but I still consider it a personal victory, having been able to finally convince my conservative Asian parent to let me do it :) I’ve also been able to steadily transition into less makeup, flatter brows, no more lipstick and no more foundation and contouring. I guess this’ll make it clearer: http://theoceanismyinkwell.tumblr.com/tagged/turtle. I haven’t mentioned it before, but my gender(queer) identity has been one of the most major sources of my anxiety/depression over the past two years, so even though I haven’t come out to my parent and am not able to wear everything I’m comfortable with wearing, just the fact that my hair is off has been liberating and overjoying beyond human expression. So yeah, I thought that tidbit of hopeful news was worth mentioning here. (Of course, the winged eyeliner I’ve spent seven darn years mastering isn’t going anywhere any time soon.)  
> As always, don’t feel shy to share your thoughts below! Love ya :D ~M


	14. Chapter 14

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

Phil looked as though there were a thousand things on his tongue, but the only thing he uttered in the end was: “Dan.”

“I’d like to rest now, Phil. I’m tired.”

“But you can’t just--”

“Phil.”

At that, Phil relented. Dan’s eyes were already closed and his head nestled into the hollow of his pillow. Phil contented himself then with observing the rise and fall of Dan’s chest--maybe a little too fast to be the breathing of someone falling asleep--and the flutter of his lashes against the dark circles under his eyes.

Everything inside Phil was shredding itself apart, and he knew something, everything, was horribly wrong.

When he was certain that Dan was actually sleeping, Phil mustered whatever energy was left in his bones and slipped out of the room to seek out Penny. Granted, the information he was searching for was probably best obtained from the doctor, but he had a feeling the man wasn’t too keen on violating patients’ privacy, or else he would not have first asked for Dan’s permission to keep Phil in the room in the first place.

Penny was staring ruefully at a snapped hair tie in her hand when Phil located her behind the rear nurses’ station. “These things are garbage,” she joked morosely, without even looking up to know it was him. It wasn’t the first time they’d shared similar wry conversations in the half-sleepy, half-philosophical buzz of the nighttime halogen lights.

“I relate so much to the hair tie,” Phil chuckled back.

“Oh, come on, let’s be real. We all do.” She then chucked it into the bin without another glance at it and finally turned to make eye contact with Phil. She patted the empty office chair next to hers, and he took it. “So how’s Danny boy doing?”

The mere question made Phil’s chest constrict. For several long seconds he struggled for the right words to say. The next thing that left his mouth must have ended up sounding like quite an odd jump in the conversation, but to Penny’s credit, she didn't even bat an eyelash. “Penny, what would you do if...if you felt that your best friend, or somebody you truly cared about was lying to you?” At Penny’s intake of breath to reply, Phil rushed to add: “I mean, if they were lying about something pretty huge that could be hurtful to _themselves_ in the end?”

“Sad to say I’ve had my fair share of those kinds of situations,” Penny confided quietly. “You’ve tried coaxing him into telling the truth?”

“Not sure ‘coaxing’ is one of the things I can say is on my very short list of social skills, but I did try to push it, yeah. He knows how I am and I know him. We did live together for eight years, after all. I can tell he’s hiding something, and I’m pretty sure he knows I know. It’s just one big elephant in the room.”

Penny fell silent for a while, worrying her lip. There was a rustle against the quiet buzz of the lights overhead as she wordlessly pushed her open bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips across the desk toward Phil. He was about the refuse, but upon second thought realized the salt would at least distract him, and he reached in for a piece.

“Look,” said Penny slowly, “you know I’m not given much room to overstep the boundaries of patient privacy. But...like I said, I have some experience with what you may be referring to. The first thing you should do, of course, is try to talk to him again, although I do understand it can be tough for anyone to open up about something like this.”

“Like ‘this’?”

In lieu of a reply, Penny reached into a nearby drawer for her purse and rifled through her wallet for a rumpled business card. Phil took it without a word--mostly from shock at the name of the organization written there--and glanced back up at the nurse.

“But--but what if he doesn’t need rehab?”

“Would you rather take the chance?”

“There’s no way he’s letting me take him there.”

“Phil. If you really care about him half as much as I think you do, then I think you’ll do this for him.”

Phil didn’t quite know just then where the urge to argue with her was coming from. He opened his mouth, sucked in a quiet breath, closed it again. The warmth of Penny’s hand on the crook of his arm the next moment seemed to bring him back to reality.

Reality. Wherever the hell that had gone.

“Believe me, I know this is just as hard on you as this is on him,” Penny whispered.

“Not--about me right now,” Phil muttered back.

She cracked a lopsided smile at that. “I always knew you were a good friend to him. I could feel it the first time I laid eyes on you.”

There was a second of palpable hesitation, perhaps on both their parts, as if Penny almost sensed she may have said something wrong, at the same time that Phil was trying to decide if anything even was wrong.

“I have another question,” Phil said slowly. “It also has to do with Dan but...also...doesn’t.”

“You should tell him how you feel.”

“W-what?”

“I mean, that _was_ what you were going to ask me about, right? Oh my gosh, I’m sorry if I offended you--”

“No no, you didn’t! I was just surprised you immediately knew what I was going to say.”

“Heavens, I hope I don’t have to launch into a speech about how ‘I’ve seen the way you look at him’ and ‘you two obviously have a connection’ and all that crap. You’re an intelligent person and a grown man.”

“But there’s...so much.” Phil’s throat closed up before he could finish his sentence. Not that it mattered, because how on earth could he possibly complete that thought? So much to what? To discuss? To dig up from the past? To try to forgive? He wasn’t even anywhere near the stage of beginning to understand this….this _so much_.

Penny fished for a rubber band in her drawer and winced as she drew it through her hair, her gaze on Phil unfocused and thoughtful. “I’m not discounting that,” she conceded. “Of course there’s a lot for you guys to talk about. I mean, rehab, for one. And that’s probably just scratching the surface of some issues there.” At Phil’s rapidly whitening visage, she tacked on, “Hey, you’ll get through this, buddy, okay? Nothing’s impossible. He’s a strong guy, and so are you. Neither of you are all that young, either, even though you may feel like it sometimes. This may be the worst you’ve both ever had to go through, but life’s prepared you all the way up to this moment, yeah? Be positive.”

“I’ll certainly try.”

“And here.” Penny grabbed a fresh tissue from her ever overflowing drawer and scrawled her phone number across it. “You don’t have to, of course, but maybe you could let me know what happens when you all get out of this god-forsaken hospital. I’ll always pick up if you need to talk.”

Phil realized in that very moment, as he reached out to take the tissue, that he’d never before thought himself capable of so many unshed tears.

~

Dan was back at the bridge. After so many goddamn days--months--years of escaping the memory, he was back at the bridge.

It was the smell that always reeled him into the remembrance, and from there he could teeter indecisively between the past and the present, what was and what was yet to be. The smell of his own fear and the sting of the salt in his tears against his dry cheeks were the first triggers. He’d learned long ago to deal with them, because in Dan Howell’s world, crying sessions and suppressed panic attacks were a regular occurrence.

But the biggest trigger must have somehow been the encounter with the doctor. More specifically, seeing and hearing Phil in the same room in some sort of surreal haze as the doctor babbled on about the opioids.

Somehow, Blake being there might not have felt nearly as _wrong_ , Dan realized suddenly. It was a dangerous thought to explore--but true. The pills were a part of James, not Dan. The thought of any part of _James_ becoming known to Phil felt wrong and it petrified him.

So, too, felt the sound of the name _Dan_ on Phil’s tongue as they dangled from the bridge.

“Dan. Why’d you do it, Dan? Why’d you jump?”

Dan’s heart was hammering inside him, and yet the rest of his body felt just as hellishly calm as Phil’s voice in his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m sorry. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“What I want to hear is the truth.”

“No, you don’t, Phil.” Dan fixed his gaze on the abstract curve of Phil’s white-knuckled grip on his wrist. He could recognize the dents and angles in those fingers anywhere. The veins running along the back of Phil’s hand and and up his arm were flexing with the effort to maintain a hold on Dan’s arm.

“I can’t save you if you don’t tell me.”

Dan clenched his teeth. “I don’t need saving.”

“You’re literally hanging off a bridge.”

“Because of you!” Dan shouted. His voice echoed mockingly across the lake.

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t fucking understand it either.” He didn’t quite know anymore when his voice had started to break. “I don’t understand anything. That’s it. That’s...that’s all.”

At first he thought Phil’s face was growing more pallid, but as his consciousness began to fade into wakefulness, the last terrifying thought that filled him was the realization that Phil's face was nothing but an illusion. For an interminable moment he was lost in the sensation of slipping from Phil's grasp and falling backwards into the dark, bracing himself for the impact of the icy water but only feeling the growing dread of nothingness.

Dan didn't come awake slowly, but with a jolt. The first sound to reach him was the whine of his heart monitor, and he winced at the stimulus.

“Phil?” he croaked, not even knowing why he uttered that name.

“Nope, just Penny, sorry.”

Although Dan didn’t quite hear the female voice at his bedside, in his bleary half-awakened vision he could just make out her blurry form bustling about the side of the room. He lifted his uninjured arm to rub his eye. “Oh. Hi. Good morning. Or is it afternoon?”

Penny turned around to face him so he could follow her as she spoke. The all-too-familiar clipboard which he'd seen pass through different pairs of hands was back in her arms. “Evening, actually,” she replied. “This is normal, by the way. I'm surprised the morphine didn't knock you out longer.”

“Kinda terrible dream,” Dan muttered back. “Joining the real world seemed like a slightly better option to me.”

Penny chuckled. “I believe you. Your monitor was starting to get a little irregular a couple minutes ago.” Noting Dan’s unsmiling expression, she, too, sobered again. “You weren't dreaming of the accident, were you?”

“Might have been better if I had been, honestly.”

“Um, listen.” Penny kept her tone cautiously light. “I know this is a crappy place to spend your days, and we're not the greatest hospital around, but we do have some amazing resources that could...help with that. If you're ever interested in talking to somebody on-site, just give me a holler and I can hook you up with the information.”

Dan forced himself to swallow down the sudden surge of bile in his throat. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

_Phil. Where is Phil? I need him._

Almost telepathically, Penny seemed to know just what to say. “Phil left a couple hours ago to attend to some business, he said. I’m sure he’ll be back.”

“Did he say he’d be back?”

“Honey, he doesn’t need to.” The smirking nurse made some more adjustments to the equipment, informed him cheerily that some solid dinner would be coming his way in a few minutes, and bid her leave.

Several minutes later, Dan found himself intensely regretting ever having woken up. Thankfully Penny must have spared him another dose of morphine--or at the very least the sheer exhaustion of his traumatic dream must have pulled him under--because the next thing he remembered, he was slipping back into the realm of fears and imaginations on his way to oblivion.

Some part of him thought he awoke often. Sometimes he could have sworn he felt the presence of another being at his bedside. Other times he felt detached from his own body, floating about the room, cursing himself for the unrequited desire that made him imagine someone there and sent tremors through his sleeping form.

When at last some strange pattern of light wriggled its way below his eyelids and hauled him back to the world of the living, Dan was taken aback to find the slumped figure of a blond, tousle-haired man at the chair beside him, ashen cheeks sunken into the depths of his jacket.

“B-babe?”

It only took Dan’s stuttered whisper to make Blake jerk his head upward. A concatenation of emotions washed over his visage: shock, relief, sorrow, and a clouded mystery he seemed to guard behind his eyes.

“Hey, Dan,” Blake whispered back. “Welcome back.”

Dan was ambushed by the shock of laughter that ripped itself out of him. His chuckle turned into a series of ragged coughs, and as he struggled to prop himself upright against the pillows with his injured wrist, Blake jumped out of the chair to push him back.

“Stop, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“’M okay.”

“Babe.” With a sigh from deep within him, Blake folded forward into him with his arms around Dan’s shoulders. Even in his half-drugged state Dan made the abstract observation that his shoulders were bonier before, and Blake’s hands were warmer and sturdier than he remembered. A once-foreign ache, growing alarmingly familiar, came alive within him, and he longed for the past several days to obliterate themselves.

It was only when Blake stirred and pulled back an arm that Dan realized his tears had been leaking out onto his boyfriend’s sleeve.

“Here, I thought you might need these.” Blake dug into his backpack on the floor and pulled out a plastic package which Dan immediately recognized.

“Blake, you didn’t have to--”

“I wanted to and you need them,” Blake interrupted him firmly.

Though his chest twinged with an unnamed guilt, Dan reluctantly took the package and struggled to open it. For a full minute of pure stubbornness he worked at the package with his one uninjured arm, grasping at whatever last shred of dignity he had in his greasy hair and flimsy hospital gown, until Blake took the box with a gentle gesture of reproval and opened it to reveal the brand new hearing aids.

Dan cursed himself for the wetness in his eyes as Blake fitted the devices to his ears and turned them on.

“Can you hear me?”

Dan could only manage a tiny, mute nod. The lump in his throat was too overwhelming.

“Oh, Dan, please don't cry.”

“’M not,” he choked out. “Blake, I--”

“Not another peep,” Blake attempted to threaten him with a wobbly smile. “I owe you, big-time. It's my fault you're in this whole mess right now.”

Dan frowned. “It's actually not. I ran out and was stupid enough to not look where I was going, to be honest.”

“Maybe. But the point is you wouldn't have ended up outside if I...hadn't treated you the way I did.”

The jagged memory of the traces of white powder in the scrap of foil in Blake's shaking hands flashed across Dan’s mind, and his chest tightened. The voices that had been dormant at the back door to his brain roared to life again. _Yet another part of your life you've kept from Phil. Another part of this mess you’ve made. He doesn’t belong in this. He can never know now._

He deserved the slap, he knew. When had he ever done anything except become a failure over and over again?

“Dan? What's on your mind?”

He turned to meet his boyfriend's gaze again. The blue eyes were brimming with pity and consternation and perhaps a little bit of what he thought was love. “I'm sorry,” he whispered, dropping his eyes back to his lap.

“No. I should have seen the signs.”

Dan chuckled humorlessly. “Right, because it's your job to fish out whenever your SO’s secretly spiraling.”

Blake didn't miss a beat. “Actually, yeah.”

“Blake.” Dan breathed out long and hard through his nose. “I hid this from you. I've been fucked up since the day we met. I've already placed far, far too much of a burden on your shoulders from the beginning of our relationship.”

“Hey. We knew what we were signing up for when we got into this. Or at least I did.” A breath later, and Blake winced. “I...didn't mean for it to come out that way.”

“No, I know.” Dan inhaled with a shudder.

“So...if I could ask...when did it start?”

“Which part of it?”

“I mean--”

“The part where I crushed the pills or the part where I bought them from different pharmacies? Or the part where I started using up spoons?” Dan's voice was harsh, he knew. He could read it in the pain creasing Blake's face. Yet somehow, in some way, some vengeful thirst found an unrepentant satisfaction in the outburst, for reasons he could not comprehend. He wanted to be angry--he _needed_ to be angry. He longed to be vicious, whether it was with himself or anyone else.

“That's not...I just... I need to know, if we're going to figure any of this out. I know you're angry about of a lot of things.”

At that, the fight drained from Dan as swiftly as it had reared its head. “I'm sorry. Just, do we need to talk about this right now?”

“Babe, we need to stop this.” Resolve hardened there in Blake's eyes.

“Stop what?”

“Stop guilting each other out of talking about shit. We need this. Okay? _We need this._ ”

“Sorry,” Dan muttered again.

“It's not...God, this is so. Um. We need to figure this out, okay? We need to get help.”

“We don't need to do that just yet. I can stop.”

“I know you _want_ to stop,” Blake replied carefully. “But don't you think it's better to have help from the start?”

“I've been to enough shrinks in my lifetime to know it's not my thing.”

“But you can't just...go on killing yourself.”

For some reason, that truly stung. Dan swallowed and rolled his head to the other side of his pillow. The next thing he knew, Blake's warm hands had seized his, squeezing it with a gentle desperation.

“Please,” Blake whispered. “I can't just sit by watching you die in front of my eyes. I won't. I love you too much.”

Dan didn't know when his heart had begun pounding in his ears. He trained his gaze on the point of contact where Blake's hand ended and his own ashen flesh began. The ring finger on Blake's left hand still bore the last vestiges of chipped black polish he remembered from that last day in the apartment before Dan had run out. A hot and blinding streak of moisture seared his eyes before falling with a patter on their enjoined hands. He managed a shaky: “I'm so fucked up,” before the rest of the tears came crashing out of him.

“No, babe. No. Oh, baby, it's okay.” Blake clambered over the rail of the bed to lie on his side next to Dan, their hands still intertwined, and caress the side of his cheek. “Dan. Look at me. We'll get through this.”

“But I--I fucked us up so much. I ruined our chances.”

“No. There's always still a chance, Dan. We're in each other's lives for a reason. I'm going to do everything I can to help you. I'll stop smoking weed, I'll get another job that has shorter hours, I'll help you take a leave of absence from school...we can go somewhere together afterwards…”

The rawness of the desperation in Blake’s voice made Dan turn back to look him in the eyes again despite himself, and as he lay with his cheek against Blake’s chest and his chin tilted upward, he was overcome by a stunned silence and the sensation of a sinking stone in his stomach. And he came to a jarring, petrifying, yet absolutely irrevocable realization.

_This is going to end._

He was going to fight for this the hardest he’d ever fought before in his life--but this would end.

He couldn’t breathe. The great and terrible ache that had always been growing and slumbering inside him yawned, and his heart twinged with the realest, sharpest pain he’d ever felt in a long, long time. He closed his eyes, willing away the hot sting of moisture there; but the manifold terror of the loss whispered life again into the tortuous tingle in his skin.

“Everything will be okay,” Blake murmured, bending his head downward to plant a ghost of a kiss in the mess of Dan’s curls.

Dan simply squeezed his eyes shut tighter and forced a nod against the fabric sheathing Blake’s chest--because there are moments when lies don’t make the truth any easier, but lies are the only option.

Neither of the two boys, caught up in each other’s arms and breaths in the middle of the hospital bed, caught sight of the fleeting shadow by the doorway just then. Hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his jean jacket, Phil darted backward as quickly as he’d strode up to the hospital room. His heart was throbbing in his mouth.

Phil shook his head, shaking, wondering if he wished it were only his imagination. Certainly he’d known since the fiasco of a conversation with Blake in the cafeteria that he and Dan were a thing, but seeing the blond man spooning Dan in a hospital bed was a completely different story. The worst part of it all, perhaps, was how Dan’s head rested against Blake’s chest as if listening to a silent heartbeat there: how Dan’s curls melded with the stubble of Blake’s chin, how natural it all looked, how _right_. 

And yet this was Dan.

His Dan.

Phil stared ahead into the empty hallway, choking soundlessly on a fresh and cursed wave of tears. He wished in a rage for his emotions to hurl themselves over the edge.

For when had Dan become his? When had he even begun to feel he had any right over him?

It was irrational, and yet the fury remained, and it perplexed him to the point of excruciation. Thought try as he might to stave off the imminent trembling inside him, there was no way around it: Dan was his. From the very night Dan had walked out the door of their flat with nothing but a little suitcase, from the very next night when Phil had stayed up fruitlessly for a miracle in the hope of seeing his best friend in the whole wide world walk back inside through that door--from the very day Phil had wept out his rage and pain at having to stuff Dan’s belongings into garbage bags--he’d known Dan Howell was his.

The next second of Phil’s consciousness was a blur of him rushing down the echoing stairwell at the end of the hallway and tearing through lobby of the hospital, gasping for air, throwing his body full force at the automatic sliding doors when they didn’t pull back fast enough. The punch of cold air to his lungs did nothing to relieve him. Instead, in a haze, he found himself falling to his knees on the pavement and his chest heaving in dry sobs. The shaking started from deep within him and traveled swiftly up his legs and didn’t stop.

His palms were wet. Why were they wet? He lifted them from the concrete and smeared one hand across his tear-streaked face before realizing that there was blood. So much blood. He felt the pain of the gash abstractly somewhere in the back of his mind, and he stared at it without reacting. It was funny, he thought, how utterly different people were, and yet their blood all looked the same. In that moment he saw before him Dan’s body twisted at all angles--motionless--a lump of cotton and blood and broken bones. All around him he heard the screaming again. He distinctly remembered a girl across the street had screamed first. And then he’d screamed.

Phil was voiceless now, his own voice a prisoner in his tears, but the memory of his scream still shattered in his eardrums.

~

Blake was gone when Dan yanked himself awake again. In his place in the same chair was Phil.

Dan blinked, suddenly and fully conscious despite the grogginess of the rest of his body, and his gaze made unnerving and unswerving contact with Phil’s. His best friend stared back, his expression for once unreadable, but he didn’t look away. The corner of Phil’s lip then gave the slightest twitch, and Dan returned it easily with a slow, sad smirk.

They stayed like that for perhaps the longest time. Neither one spoke nor stirred; neither did they glance away. Dan could not be sure that they meant to say the same things with their looks, yet he felt almost certain that the shared moment of that one gaze held the entire weight of their questions, their accusations, their rage and guilt and forgiveness all at once.

Dan was finally the first to break the silence with the embarrassing gravelly soreness of his voice. “New hearing aids and I forgot to turn them off so my head aches like a bitch.”

“You look fantastic,” Phil offered with a tight-lipped grin. He lifted the coffee cup to his lips with his right hand, drawing Dan’s attention for the first time to the clumsy bandage there crusted on one side with blood. Dan knew he should say something, too, about the unwashed traces of maroon streaks on one side of Phil’s face. But this was them. Phil knew he knew. There was nothing to say about it.

Instead, he opted for the obvious stupidity of his banter. “Looks like somebody’s been breaking out all the props. Thought you were a director, not a stuntman?”

“Shut up.” Again the irresistible twitch in Phil’s mouth around the lip of his paper cup.

“You should eat something.”

“I am.”

“Caffeine isn’t food. You need actual sustenance.”

“Says you. Penny says you haven’t touched your tray. I went through special trouble to make sure you got something solid, you ungrateful turnip.”

Dan rolled his eyes. “Ha, ha, stealing all my lines since 2009.”

They both knew, even before the words left Dan’s mouth, that the spark of nostalgia would be triggered in their chests, yet neither one was prepared for the impact once the sentence hung in the air between them. Phil cleared his throat and shifted forward in his seat. Dan sighed and propped himself up a little more comfortably on his side.

“I’m going to get help, I think,” he blurted out.

Phil visibly froze. He’d had one hand in the pocket of his jacket, and when he moved again it became clear to Dan why. Between his fingers Phil held a rumpled business card. Dan may have been fuzzy from floating on a dozen meds, but he was intelligent enough to know what this meant.

“I’m not going to whatever rehab Penny thinks she has the right to recommend to you,” he said. Loudly, a bit harshly.

“But you just said you need help.”

“Not that. Phil, I can’t even stand it here, even if it’s got the nicest nurses on earth. If only I weren’t tied down with IVs and meds, you know I’d get up and walk out of here.”

“I mean, the feasibility of that plan’s a bit debatable.”

Dan ignored the bait to fall back into banter and forged ahead. “I just. I can’t. I told--I might considering trying another therapist.”

“Dan.” This time Phil’s voice was stern and unyielding. “You _know_ this isn’t something that can just be fixed with therapy.”

 _Because I’m already so broken?_ Dan bit back the bitter retort. This was Phil. They weren’t supposed to fight. More importantly, they _understood_ what each other was saying, even when it came out slightly wrong.

“Will you be there with me?”

“You know I can’t.” Phil rubbed his brow to hide his tortured look. “I’ll help you with the paperwork, the logistics. I’ll drop you off. I’ll come visit. You can write to me as often as you want.”

“I don’t know.”

“Dan. I don’t really know what you’ve been on or how long this has been going on, but...as soon as you’re discharged and the dosage of your pain meds goes down and you have to deal with being at home...I doubt you’re just gonna sit around and power through the withdrawal symptoms.”

Dan closed his eyes, suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to throw up.

“At least think about it seriously, Dan. Please.”

Phil hadn’t even finished his last sentence when Dan interrupted him with a whispered: “Okay.”

“What?”

“Okay. I’ll go.”

“Oh.” Phil leaned back, stunned. He’d obviously been expecting a bigger fight from Dan.

“I’m tired of being a failure and disappointing the people I love,” Dan went on, opening his eyes again and staring up at the ceiling. “You know? I tried to hide this from you. Tried to hide it from everybody, really. Obviously that didn’t work. It’s not like I _want_ to stay this way.”

“I know,” Phil replied gently. “I know it’s much harder than it looks. I understand.”

“Yeah,” Dan simply said, stopped up with recondite emotion.

“You should go back to sleep, probably. I’ve done nothing but come at you with these serious conversations and you need your strength back.”

Dan rolled his head back to the side to catch Phil’s gaze. He chuckled. “You come all the way here just to watch me sleep.”

Phil shrugged. “I don’t mind. How do you know I didn’t just sometimes stand in the doorway of your room before and watch you sleep? Maybe I’m like an incubus but like in a non-sexual way. I feed off the energy of your sleeping form.”

Dan was already full-on laughing before Phil was even finished. “Oh my God, you idiot. Shut up.”

“I really mean it!”

“What? _You_ , being an incubus?”

“Well, that too, but about you sleeping. I’m serious. I’ll be here when you wake up again.”

“Okay.” Dan didn’t stir or roll over. He just lay there, fixing his gaze softly on the depths of Phil’s blue eyes, enjoying the torture of the familiarity he found there. They continued to look at each other like that, smiling occasionally as if stumbling simultaneously on the same inside joke, until at last Dan’s eyelids fluttered closed and his breathing grew deep and even.

Several minutes later, as he wordlessly contemplated the roughness of the bandage on his hand, Phil heard a low buzz. It was Dan’s phone vibrating from inside the top drawer of the night table.

Phil knew what he was about to do was by all counts wrong, but it was a moment when the unadulterated force of the thought _This is my Dan_ rose up again inside him. He was tired of resisting.

He leaned forward to open the drawer, reached for the phone, saw that the screen was still lit up with the notification. It was a text from Blake.

Phil swiped up and, barely noticing the slight tremor in his fingers, punched in the passcode that his pounding heart told him was right. 2009. It had never changed.

_From: Blakesters <3_  
_I’m sorry babe but...I have to know. Did you mean it when you said you love him?_

The breath caught in the back of Phil’s throat. No explanations, no names were needed.

Neither did his next action have any explanation. Blood bubbled up behind Phil’s teeth as he bit down on his tongue. Then he tapped the text message and deleted it.

He didn’t know why he did it.

Was he trying to be some hero? Did he want Dan to stay with Blake?

Or was he secretly trying to destroy them?

Phil stood up quickly on unsteady legs. He carded his hand through his unkempt quiff and paced. This had to stop. It had to end somehow.

Because Dan had been right all along. As long as he and Phil were in each other’s lives, they were bound to hurt one another over and over again.

“You know I never meant to say goodbye,” he said aloud to Dan’s sleeping body. The bruised and battered and curly-haired boy he loved never moved.

With another shake of his head, Phil tossed the phone back onto the nightstand and strode out the door. And he forced himself to not look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: *uneasy chuckling* heyyy, how ya doin’, folks? Miss me much? You should...considering it’s been almost six. Fricking. Months. Y’all knew I was putting this fic on hiatus starting September-Octoberish because of having to finish my two other long fics for the Phandom Big Bang 2017 (both of which are now up!! Check them out if you haven’t already! Pretty please? Links below.). Well, so much other stuff has happened since posting those fics in November! You wouldn’t even believe. Applied to a bunch of PhD programs, got accepted to the university of my dreams, dealt with family drama, battled some serious depression, almost got outed, and--most importantly--I GOT A GIRLFRIEND. YUP. They’re amazing and unique and breathtaking and pretty much the goddamn sun of my entire universe so I will find anyone who harms them. Fun fact: we met through this very fic because they were a huge (ph)an of my writing and so we got to talking (er, phangirling) about D&P about a year ago before we realized our feelings for each other and I made the first nerve-wracking confession.
> 
> Also, don’t tell them, but I’m proposing to them this year. Yup.
> 
> ...And on that note, what’d you think of this update? :D ~M
> 
> P.S. [PBB2k17 fic #1, Your Freudian Slip](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12630222/chapters/28778514)  
> [PBB2k17 fic #2, All the Sinners Crawl](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12755088)


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